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AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LOVE-LETTERS
First Edition, Nm'embcr 1900
Second hnpression, December 1900
Third Impression, January igoi
Fctirth hnpression., January 1901
Fifth Impression January igoi
AN
ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LOVE-LETTERS
LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET
1901
Edinburgh
T.and A. Constable. Printers to Her Majesty
AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LOVE-LETTERS
EXPLANATION
It need hardly be said that the woman
by whom these letters were written had
no thought that they would be read by
any one but the person to whom they
were addressed. But a request, con-
veyed under circumstances which the
wi'iter herself would have regarded as
all-commanding, urges that they should
now be given to the world : and, so far
as is possible with a due regard to the
claims of privacy, what is here printed
presents the letters as they were first
written in their complete form and
sequence.
Very little has been omitted which
in any way bears upon the devotion of
which they are a record. A few names
A
2 AN: ENGLISHWOMAN'S
of peiso!is and localities have been
changed ; and several short notes (not
above twenty in all), together with some
])assages bearing too intimately upon
events which might be recognised, have
been left out without indication of their
omission.
It was a necessary condition to the
present publication that the authorship
of these letters should remain unstated.
Those who know wdll keep silence : those
who do not, will not find here any data
likely to guide them to the truth.
The story which darkens these pages
cannot be more fully indicated while the
feelings of some who are still living have
to be consulted : nor will the reader find
the root of the tragedy explained in the
letters themselves. But one thing at
least may be said as regards the principal
actors — that to the memory of neither of
them does any blame belong. They were
equally the victims of circumstances,
which came whole out of the hands of
fate and reinained, so far as one of the
tw^o was concerned, a mystery to the day
of her death.
LOVE-LETTERS
LETTER 1
Beloved, — This is your first letter from
me : yet it is not the first 1 have written
to you. There are letters to you lying
at love's dead-letter office in this same
writing— so many, my memory has lost
count of them !
This is my confession : I told you I
had one to make, and you laughed : —
you did not know how serious it was
— for to be in love with you long before
you were in love with me, — nothing can
be more serious than that !
You deny that I was : yet I know
when you first really loved me. All at
once, one day something about me came
upon you as a surprise : and how, except
on the road to love, can there be sur-
prises ? And in the surprise came love.
You did not know me before. Before
then, it was only the other nine entangle-
4 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
ments which take hold of the male heart
and occupy it till the tenth is ready to
make one knot of them all.
In the letter written that day, I said,
' You love me.' I could never have said
it before; though I had written twelve
letters to my love for you, I had not
once been able to write of your love for
me. Was not that serious ?
Now I have confessed ! I thought to
discover myself all blushes, but my face
is cool : you have kissed all my blushes
away ! Can I ever be ashamed in your
eyes now, or grow rosy because of any-
thing you think or / think ? So ! — you
have robbed me of one of my charms :
I am brazen. Can you love me still ?
You love me, you love me; you are
wonderful I we are both wonderful, you
and I.
Well, it is good for you to know I
have waited and wished, long before the
thing came true. But to see you waiting
and wishing, when the thing was true all
the time : — oh ! that was the trial ! How
not suddenly to throw my arms round
you and cry, ' Look, see ! O blind mouth,
why are you famished ? '
LOVE-LETTERS 6
And you never knew ? Dearest, I
love you for it, you never knew ! 1
believe a man, when he finds he has won,
thinks he has taken the city by assault :
he does not guess how to the insiders it
has been a weary siege, with flags of sur-
render fluttering themselves to rags from
every wall and window ! No : in love it
is the women who are the strategists ; and
they have at last to fall into the ambush
they know of with a good grace.
You must let me praise myself a little
for the past, since I can never praise my-
self again. You must do that for me
now ! There is not a battle left for me
to win. You and peace hold me so much
ai, prisoner, have so caught me from my
own way of living, that I seem to hear a
pin drop twenty years ahead of me : it
seems an event! Dearest, a thousand
times, I would not have it be other-
wise : I am only too willing to drop out
of existence altogether and find myself
in your arms instead. Giving you my
love, I can so easily give you my life.
Ah, my dear, I am yours so utterly, so
gladly ! Will you ever find it out, you,
who took so long to discover anything ?
AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER IT
Dearest, — Your name woke me this
morning : I found my lips piping their
song before I was well back into my
body out of dreams. I wonder if the
rogues babble when my spirit is nesting ?
Last night you were a high tree and
I was in it, the wind blowing us both ;
but I forget the rest, — whatever, it was
enough to make me wake happy.
There are dreams that go out like
candle-light directly one opens the
shutters: they illumine the walls no
longer; the daylight is too strong for
them. So, now, I can hardly remember
anything of my dreams : daylight, with
you in it, floods them out.
Oh, how are you ? Awake ? Up ?
Have you breakfasted ? I ask you a
thousand things. You are thinking of
me, I know : but what are you thinking ?
LOVE-LETTERS 7
I am devoured by curiosity about myself
— none at all about you, whom I have
all by heart ! If I might only know how
happy I make you, and just which thing
I said yesterday is making you laugh
to-day — I could cry with joy over being
the person I am.
It is you who make me think so much
about myself, trying to find myself out.
I used to be most self-possessed, and
regarded it as the crowning virtue : and
now — your possession of me sweeps it
away, and I stand crying to be let into a
secret that is no longer mine. Shall I
ever know xvhy you love me ? It is my
religious difficulty ; but it never rises into
a doubt. You do love me, I know.
Why, I don't think I ever can know.
Yet ask me the same question about
yourself, and it becomes absurd, because
I altogether belong to you. If I hold
my breath for a moment wickedly (for I
can't do it breathing), and try to look at
the world with you out of it, I seem to
have fallen over a precipice ; or rather,
the solid earth has slipped from under my
feet, and I am off into vacuum. Then,
as I take breath again for fear, my star
8 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
swims up and clasps me, and shows me
your face. O happy star this that I was
born under, that moved with me and
winked quiet prophecies at me all
through my childhood, I not knowing
what it meant : — the dear radiant thing
naming to me my lover I
As a child, now and then, and for no
reason, I used to be sublimely happy :
real wings took hold of me. Sometimes
a field became fairyland as I walked
through it ; or a tree poured out a scent
that its blossoms never had before or
after. I think now that those must have
been moments when you too were in like
contact with earth, — had your feet in
grass which felt a faint ripple of wind,
or stood under a lilac in a drench of
fragrance that had grown double after
rain.
When I asked you about the places of
your youth, I had some fear of finding
that we might once have met, and that
I had not remembered it as the summing
up of my happiness in being young. Far
off I see something undiscovered waiting
us, something I could not have guessed
at before — the happiness of being old.
LOVE-LETTERS 9
Will it not be something like the evening
before last when we were sitting together,
your hand in mine, and one by one, as
the twilight drew about us, the stars
came and took up their stations over-
head ? They seemed to me then to be
following out some quiet train of thought
in the universal mind : the heavens were
remembering the stars back into their
places : — the Ancient of Days drawing
upon the infinite treasures of memory in
his great lifetime. Will not Love's old
age be the same to us both — a starry
place of memories ?
Your dear letter is with me while I
write : how shortly you are able to say
everything ! To-morrow you will come.
What more do I want — except to-morrow
itself, with more promises of the same
thing ?
You are at my heart, dearest : nothing
in the world can be nearer to me than
you I
10 AN ExNGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER III
Dearest and rightly Beloved, — You
cannot tell how your gift has pleased
me ; or rather you can, for it shows you
have a long memory back to our first
meeting : though at the time I was the
one who thought most of it.
It is quite true ; you have the most
beautifully shaped memory in Christen-
dom : these are the very books in the
very edition I have long wanted, and
have been too humble to afford myself.
And now I cannot stop to read one,
for joy of looking at them all in a row.
I will kiss you for them all, and for
more besides : indeed it is the ' besides '
which brings you my kisses at all.
Now that you have chosen so perfectly
to my mind, I may proffer a request
which, before, I was shy of making. It
seems now beneficently anticipated. It
LOVE-LEITERS 11
is that you will not ever let your gifts
take the form of jewellery, not after the
ring which you are bringing me : that,
you know, I both welcome and wish for.
But, as to the rest, the world has supplied
me with a feeling against jewellery as
a love-symbol. Look abroad and you
will see : it is too possessive, too much
like ' chains of office ' — the fair one is
to wear her radiant harness before the
world, that other women may be envious
and the desire of her master's eye be
satisfied ! Ah, no !
I am yours, dear, utterly ; and nothing
you give me would have that sense : I
know you too well to think it. But in
the face of the present fashion (and to
flout it), which expects the lover to give
in this sort, and the beloved to show her-
self a dazzling captive, let me cherish my
ritual of opposition which would have
no meaning if we were in a world of
our own, and no place in my thoughts,
dearest ; — as it has not now, so far as you
are concerned. But I am conscious I
shall be looked at as your chosen ; and
I would choose my own way of how to
look back most proudly.
12 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
And so for the books more thanks and
more, — that they are what I would most
wish, and not anything else : which, had
they been, they would still have given
me pleasure, since from you they could
come only with a good meaning : and —
diamonds even — I could have put up
with them !
To-morrow you come for your ring,
and bring me my own ? Yours is here
waiting. I have it on my finger, very
loose, with another standing sentry over
it to keep it from running away.
A mouse came out of my wainscot
last night, and plunged me in horrible
dilemma : for I am equally idiotic over
the idea of the creature trapped or free,
and I saw sleepless nights ahead of me
till I had secured a change of locality
for him.
To startle him back into hiding would
have only deferred my getting truly rid
of him, so I was most tiptoe and diplo-
matic in my doings. Finally, a paper
bag, put into a likely nook with some
sentimentally preserved wedding - cake
crumbled into it, crackled to me of his
arrival. In a brave moment I noosed
LOVE-LETTERS IS
the little beast, bag and all, and lowered
him from the window by string, till the
shrubs took from me the burden of re-
sponsibility.
I visited the bag this morning : he had
eaten his way out, crumbs and all : and
has, I suppose, become a fieldmouse,
for the hay smells invitingly, and it is
only a short run over the lawn and a
jump over the ha-ha to be in it. Poor
morsels, I prefer them so much un-
domesticated !
Now this mouse is no allegory, and the
paper bag is not a diamond necklace, in
spite of the w^edding-cake sprinkled over
it ! So don't say that this letter is too
hard for your understanding, or you will
frighten me from telling you anything
foolish again. Brains are like jewels in
this, difference of surface has nothing to
do with the size and value of them.
Yours is a beautiful smooth round, like
a pearl, and mine all facets and flashes
like cut glass. And yours so much the
bigger, and I love it so much the best !
The trap which caught me was baited with
one great pearl. So the mouse comes in
with a meaning tied to its tail after all !
14 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER IV
In all the world, dearest, what is more
unequal than love bet\v^een a man and
a woman ? I have been spending an
amorous morning and want to share it
with you : but lo, the task of bringing
that bit of my life into your vision is
altogether beyond me.
What have I been doing ? Dear man,
I have been dressmaking ! and dress,
when one is in the toils, is but a love-
letter writ large. You will see and admire
the finished thing, but you will take no
interest in the composition. Therefore
I say your love is unequal to mine.
For think how ravished I would be
if you brought me a coat and told me
it was all your own making ! One day
you had thrown down a mere tailor-
made thing in the hall, and yet I kissed
it as I went by. And that was at a
LOVE-LETTERS 15
time when we were only at the hand-
shaking stage, the palsied beginnings of
love : — you, I mean !
But oh, to get you interested in the
dress I was making to you to-day I — the
beautiful flowing opening, — not too flow-
ing : the elaborate central composition
where the heart of me has to come,
and the wind-up of the skirt, a long
reluctant tailing-off", full of commas and
colons of ribbon to make it seem longer,
and insertions everywhere. I dreamed
myself in it, retiring through the door
after having bidden you good-night, and
you watching the long disappearing
eloquence of that tail, still saying to
you as it vanished, ' Good-bye, good-bye.
I love you so ! see me, how slowly I am
going ! '
Well, that is a bit of my dress-
making, a very corporate part of my
aflection for you ; and you are not a
bit interested, for I have shown you
none of the seamy side ; it is that
Avhich interests you male creatures,
Zolaites,* every one of you.
And what have you to show similar,
of the thought of me entering into all
16 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
your masculine pursuits ? Do you go
out rabbit-shooting for the love of me ?
If so, I trust you make a miss of it
every time ! That you are a sportsman
is one of the very hardest things in life
that I have to bear.
Last night Peterkins came up with
me to keep guard against any further
intrusion of mice. I put her to sleep
on the couch : but she discarded the
red shawl I had prepared for her at the
bottom, and lay at the top most un-
comfortably in a parcel of millinery
into which from one end I had already
made excavations, so that it formed a
large bag. Into the funlier end of this
bag Turks crept and snuggled down :
but every time she turned in the night
(and it seemed very often) the brown
paper crackled and woke me up. So
at last I took it up and shook out its
contents ; and Pippins slept soundly
on red flannel till Nan-nan brought
the tea.
You will notice that in this small
narrative Peterkins gets three names*
it is a fashion that runs through the
household, beginning with the Mother-
LOVE-LEITERS 17
Aunt, who on some days speaks of
Nan-nan as 'the old lady,' and some-
times as ' that girl,' all according to the
two tempers she has about Nan-nan's
privileged position in regard to me.
You were only here yesterday, and
already I want you again so much, so
much I
Your never satisfied but always loving,
18 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER V
Most Beloved, — I have been thinking,
staring at tliis blank piece of paper, and
wondering how there am I ever to say
what I have in me here — not wishing to
say anything at all, but just to be ! I feel
that I am living now only because you
love me : and that my life will have run
out, like this penful of ink, when that
use in me is past. Not yet, Beloved, oh,
not yet ! Nothing is finislied that we
have to do and be : — hardly begun ! I will
not call even this ' midsummer,' however
much it seems so : it is still only spring.
Every day your love binds me more
deeply than I knew the day before : so
that no day is the same now, but each
one a little happier than the last. JNIy
own, you are my very own ! And yet,
true as that is, it is not so true as that
I am your own. It is less absolute, I
LOVE-LETTERS 19
mean ; and must be so, because I can-
not very well take possession of anything
when I am given over heart and soul out
of my own possession : there isn't enough
identity left in me, I am yours so much,
so much ! All this is useless to say, yet
what can I say else, if I have to begin
saying anything.
Could I truly be your 'star and goddess,'
as you call me. Beloved, I would do you
the service of Thetis at least (who did it
for a greater than herself) —
* Bid Heaven and Earth combine their charms,
And round you early, round you late,
Briareus fold his hundred arms
To guard you from your single fate.'
But I haven't got power over an eight-
armed octopus even : so am merely a very
helpless loving nonentity which merges
itself most happily in you, and begs to
be lifted to no pedestal at all, at all.
If you love me in a manner that is at
all possible, you will see that ' goddess '
does not suit me. ' Star ' I would I were
now, with a wide eye to carry my looks
to you over this horizon which keeps
you invisible. Choose one, if you will,
dearest, and call it mine : and to me it shall
20 AN EiNGLlSHWOMAI^TS
be yours : so that when we are apart and
the stars come out, our eyes may meet
up at the same point in the heavens, and
be 'keeping company' for us among the
celestial bodies — with their permission :
for I have too hvely a sense of their
beauty not to be a little superstitious
about them. Have you not felt for
yourself a sort of physiognomy in the
constellations, — most of them seeming
benevolent and full of kind regards : —
but not all ? I am always glad when the
Great Bear goes aw^ay from my window,
fine beast though he is : he seems to
growl at me! No doubt it is largely
a question of names; and what's in a
name ? In yours, Beloved, w^hen I
speak it, more love than I can compass !
T.OVE-LETTERS 21
LETTER VI
Beloved, — I have been trusting to fate,
while keeping silence, tliat something
from you was to come to-day and make
me specially happy. And it has : bless
you abundantly ! You have undone and
got round all I said about 'jewellery,'
though this is nothing of the sort, but
a shrine : so my word remains. I have
it with me now, safe hidden, only now
and then it comes out to have a look
at me, — smiles and goes back again.
Dearest, you must feel how I thank you,
for I cannot say it: body and soul I
grow too much blessed with all that you
have given me, both visibly and invisibly,
and always perfectly.
And as for the day : I have been
thinking you the most uncurious of men,
because you had not asked : and supposed
it was too early days yet for )ou to
22 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
remember that I had ever been born.
To-day is my birthday ! you said no-
thing, so I said nothing; and yet this
has come : I trusted my star to show its
sweet influences in its own way. Or, after
all, did you know, and had you asked
any one but me ? Yet had you known,
you would have wished me the ' happy
returns ' which among all your dear
words to me you do not. So I take it
that the motion comes straight to you
from heaven ; and, in the event, you will
pardon me for having been still secretive
and shy in not telling what you did not
inquire after. Yom^s, I knew, dear, quite
long ago, so had no need to ask you for
it. And it is six months before you will
be in the same year with me again, and
give to twenty-two all the companion-
able sweetness that twenty-one has been
having.
JNIany happy returns of my birthday
to you, dearest! That is all that my
birthdays are for. Have you been happy
to-day, I wonder ? and am wondering also
whether this evening we shall see you
walking quietly in and making every-
thing into perfection that has been
LOVE-LETTERS 28
trembling just on the verge of it all
day long.
One drawback of my feast is that I
have to write short to you ; for there are
other correspondents who on this occa-
sion look for quick answers, and not all
of them to be answered in an offhand
way. Except you, it is the cosiest whom
I keep waiting; but elders have a way
with them — even kind ones : and when
they condescend to write upon an anni-
versary, we have to skip to attention or
be in their bad books at once.
So with the sun still a long way out of
bed, I have to tuck up these sheets for
you, as if the good of the day had already
been sufficient unto itself and its full tale
had been told. Good-night. It is so
hard to take my hands off writing to
you, and worry on at the same exercise
in another direction. I kiss you more
times than I can count : it is almost
really you that I kiss now ! My very
dearest, my own sweetheart, whom I so
worship. Good-night! 'Good-afternoon'
sounds too funny : is outside our vocabu-
lary altogether. While I live, I must
love you more than I know 1
24 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER VII
My Friend,— Do you think this a cold
way of beginning ? I do not : is it not
the true send-off of love ? I do not know
how men fall in love : but I could not
have had tliat come-down in your direc-
tion without being your friend first. Oh,
my dear, and after, after; it is but a
limitless friendship I have grown into !
I have heard men run down the friend-
ships of women as having little true
substance. Those who speak so, I think,
have never come across a real case of
woman's friendship. I praise my own
sex, dearest, for I know some of their
loneliness, which you do not : and until
a certain date their friendship was the
deepest thing in life I had met with.
For must it not be true that a woman
becomes more absorbed in friendship
than a man, since friendship may have to
LOVE-LETTERS 25
mean so much more to her, and cover so
far more of her life, than it does to the
average man ? However big a man's
capacity for friendship, the beauty of it
does not fill his whole horizon for the
future : he still looks ahead of it for the
mate who will complete his life, giving
his body and soul the complement they re-
quire. Friendship alone does not satisfy
him : he makes a bigger claim on life,
regarding certain possessions as his right.
But a woman ; — oh, it is a fashion to say
the best women are sure to find husbands,
and have, if they care for it, the certainty
before them of a full life. I know it is not
so. There are women, wonderful ones,
who come to know quite early in life that
no men will ever wish to make wives of
them : for them, then, love in friendshij)
is all that remains, and the strongest wisli
of all that can pass through their souls
with hope for its fulfilment is to be a
friend to somebody.
It is man's arrogant certainty of his
future wliich makes him impatient of the
word ' friendship ' ; it cools life to his lips,
he so confident that the headier nectar
is his due I
26 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
I came upon a little phrase the other
day that touched me so deeply : it said
so well what I have wanted to say since
we have known each other. Some
peasant rhymer, an Irishman, is singing
his love's praises, and sinks his voice from
the height of his passionate superlatives
to call her his ' share of the world.'
Peasant and Irishman, he knew that his
fortune did not embrace the universe : but
for him his love was just that — his share
of the world.
Surely when in any one's friendship we
seem to have gained our share of the
world, that is all that can be said. It
means all that we can take in, the whole
armful the heart and senses are capable
of, or that fate can bestow. And for how
many that must be friendship — especially
for how many women !
My dear, you are my share of the world,
also my share of Heaven : but there 1
begin to speak of what I do not know, as
is the way with happy humanity. All
that my eyes could dream of waking or
sleeping, all that my ears could be most
glad to hear, all that my heart could beat
faster to get hold of— your friendship
LOVE-LETTERS 27
gave me suddenly as a bolt from the
blue.
My friend, my friend, my friend I If
you could change or go out of my life
now, the sun would drop out of my
heavens : I should see the world with a
great piece gashed out of its side, — my
share of it gone. No, I should not see it,
I don't think I should see anything ever
again, — not truly.
Is it not strange how often to test our
happiness we harp on sorrow ? I do :
dont let it weary you. I know I have
read somewhere that great love always
entails pain. I have not found it yet :
but, for me, it does mean fear, — the sort
of fear I had as a child going into big
buildings. I loved them : but I feared,
because of their bigness, they were likely
to tumble on me.
But when I begin to think you may
be too big for me, I remember you as my
'friend,' and the fear goes for a time, or
becomes that sort of fear I would not
part with if I might.
I have no news for you : only the old
things to tell you, the wonder of which
ever remains new. How holv vour face
28 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
has become to me : as I saw it last, with
something more than the usual proofs of
love for me upon it — a look as if your
love troubled you I 1 know the trouble :
I feel it, dearest, in my own woman's
way. Have patience. — When I see you
so, I feel that prayer is the only way
given me for saying what my love for
you wishes to be. And yet I hardly ever
pray in words.
Dearest, be happy when you get this :
and, when you can, come and give my
happiness its rest. Till then it is a watch-
man on the lookout.
* Night-night 1 ' Your true sleepy one.
LOVE-LETTERS 29
LETTER VIII
Now tvhy, I want to know, Beloved, was
I so specially ' good 'to you in my last ?
I have been quite as good to you fifty
times before, — if such a thing can be from
me to you. Or do you mean good foi^
you ? Then, dear, I must be sorry that
the thins: stands out so much as an
exception !
Oh, dearest Beloved, for a little I think
I must not love you so much, or must
not let you see it.
When does your mother return, and
when am I to see her ? I long to so
much. Has she still not written to you
about our news ?
I woke last night to the sound of a
great flock of sheep going past. I sup-
pose they were going by forced marches
to the fair over at Hylesbury. It was in
the small hours : and a few of them lifted
30 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
up their voices and complained of this
robbery of night and sleep in the night.
They were so tired, so tired, they said :
and so did the muffawully patter of
their poor feet. The lambs said most;
and the sheep agreed with a husky
croak.
I said a prayer for them, and went to
sleep again as the sound of the lambs
died away ; but somehow they stick in
my heart, those sad sheep driven along
through the night. It was in its degree
like the woman hurrying along, who said,
* My God, my God 1 ' that summer Sun-
day morning. These notes from lives
that appear and disappear remain end-
lessly ; and I do not think our hearts can
have been made so sensitive to suffering
we can do nothing to relieve, without
some good reason. So I tell you this, as
I would any sorrow of my own, because
it has become a part of me, and is under-
lying all that I think to-day.
I am to expect you the day after to-
morrow, but ' not for certain ' ? Thus
you give and you take away, equally
blessed in either case. All the same, I
shall certainly expect you, and be dis-
LOVE-LEITEKS 31
appointed if on Thursday at about this
hour your way be not my way.
' How shall I my true love know ' if he
does not come often enough to see me ?
Sunshine be on you all possible hours till
we meet again.
32 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER IX
Beloved, — Is the morning looking at
you as it is looking at me ? A little to
tlie right of the sun there lies a small
cloud, filmy and faint, but enough to
cast a shadow somewhere. From this
window, high up over the view, I cannot
see where the shadow of it falls, — further
than my eye can reach : perhaps just
now over you, since you lie further
west. But I cannot be sure. We can-
not be sure about the near things in this
world ; only about what is far off and
fixed.
You and I looking up see the same
sun, if there are no clouds over us : but
we may not be looking at the same
clouds even when both our hearts are in
shadow. That is so, even when hearts
are as close together as yours and mine :
they respond to the same light : but each
LOVE-LETTERS 33
one has its own roof of shadow, wearing
its rue with a world of difference.
Why is it ? why can no two of us have
sorrows quite in common ? What can
be nearer together than our wills to be
one ? In joy we are ; and yet, though I
reach and reach, and sadden if you are
sad, I cannot make your sorrow my own.
I suppose sorrow is of the earth earthy :'
and all that is of earth makes division.
Every joy that belongs to the body casts
shadows somewhere. I wonder if there
can enter into us a joy that has no
shadow anywhere ? The joy of having
you has behind it the shadow of parting ;
is there any way of loving that would
make parting no sorrow at all ? To me,
now, the idea seems treason ! I cling
to my sorrow^ that you are not here :
I send up my cloud, as it w^ere, to catch
the sun's brightness : it is a kite that I
pull with my heart-strings.
To the sun of love the clouds that
cover absence must look like white flowers
in the green fields of earth, or like doves
hovering : and he reaches down and
strokes them with his warm beams, mak-
ing all their feathers like gold.
34 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
Some clouds let the gold come through;
7nine, now. — That cloud I saw away to
the right is coming this way towards me.
I can see the shadow of it now, moving
along a far-off strip of road : and 1
wonder if it is your cloud, with you under
it coming to see me again !
When you come, why am I any happier
than when I know you are coming ? It
is the same thing in love. I have you
now all in my mind's eye ; I have you
by heart; have I my arms a bit more
round you then than now ?
How it puzzles me that, when love is
perfect, there should be disappearances
and reappearances : and faces now and
then showing a change ! — You, actually,
the last time you came, looking a day
older than the day before ! What was
it ? Had old age blown you a kiss, or
given you a wrinkle in the art of dying ?
Or had you turned over some new leaf,
and found it withered on the other
side?
I could not see how it was : I heard
you coming — it was spring ! The door
opened : — oh, it was autumnal ! One
day had fallen away like a leaf out of
LOVE-LETTERS 86
my forest, and I had not been there to
see it go !
At what hour of the twenty- four does
a day shed itself out of our lives ? Not, I
think, on the stroke of the clock, at mid-
night, or at cock-crow. Some people,
perhaps, would say — with the first sleep ;
and that the ' beauty-sleep ' is the new
day putting out its green wings. / think
it must be not till something happens to
make the new day a stronger impression
than the last. So it would please me to
think that your yesterday dropped off
as you opened the door; and that, had
I peeped and seen you coming up the
stairs, I should have seen you looking a
day younger.
That means that you age at the sight
of me ! I think you do. I, I feel a
hundred on the road to immortality,
directly your face dawns on me.
There 's a foot gone over my grave I
The angel of the resurrection with his
mouth pursed fast to his trumpet ! —
Nothing else than the gallop-a-gallop of
your horse : — it sounds like a kettle
boiling over !
So this goes into hiding : listens to us
36 AN ENGLISHWO:\rAN'S
all the while we talk ; and comes out
afterwards with all its blushes stale, to
be rouged up again and sent off the
moment your back is turned. No, better !
— to be slipped into your pocket and
carried home to yourself by yourself.
How, when you get to your destination
and find it, you will curse yourself that
you were not a speedier postman I
T.OVE-LETTERS 37
LETTER X
Dearest, — Did you find your letter ?
The quicker I post, the quicker I need
to sit down and write again. The grass
under love's feet never stops growing :
I must make hay of it while the sun
shines.
You say my metaphors make you
giddy. — INIy dear, you, without a meta-
phor in your composition, do that to me !
So it is not for you to complain ; your
curses simply fly back to roost. Where
do you pigeon-hole them ? In a pie ?
(I mean to write now until I have made
you as giddy as a dancing dervish !)
Vour letters are nmch more like black-
birds : and I have a pie of them here,
twenty-four at least ; and when I open it
they sing ' Chewee, chewee, cliewee ! ' in
the most scared way !
Your last but three said most solemnly,
38 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
just as if you meant it, ' I hope you don't
keep these miserables ! Though I fill up
my hollow hours with them, there is no
reason why they should fill up yours.'
You added that I was better occupied —
and here I am ' better occupied ' even as
you bid me.
But one can jump best from a spring-
board : and how could I jump as far as
your arms by letter, if I had not yours to
jump from ?
So you see they are kept, and my dis-
obedience of you has begun : and I find
disobedience wonderfully sweet. But
then, you gave me a law which you
knew I should disobey : — that is the way
the world began. It is not for nothing
that I am a daughter of Eve.
And here is our world in our hands,
yours and mine, now in the making.
Which day are the evening and the
morning now? I think it must be the
birds' — and already, with the wings, dis-
obedience has been reached ! Make much
of it ! the day wiU come when I shall
wish to obey. There are moments when
I feel a wish taking hold of me stronger
than I can understand, that you should
LOVE-LETTERS S9
command me beyond myself — to things
I have not strength or courage for of my
own accord. How close, dearest, when
that day comes, my heart will feel itself
to yours ! It feels close noAv : but it is to
your feet I am nearest, as yet. Lift me !
There, there, Beloved, I kiss you Avith all
my will. Oh, dear heart, forgive me for
being no more than I am : your freehold
to all eternity !
40 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER XI
Oh, Dearest, — I have danced and I
have danced till I am tired ! I am drop-
ping vyrith sleep, but I must just touch
you and say good-night. This was our
great day of publishing, dearest, ours :
all the world knows it ; and all admire
your choice ! I was determined they
should I I have been collecting scalps
for you to hang at your girdle. All
thought me beautiful : people who never
did so before. I wanted to say to them,
' Am I not beautiful ? I am, am I not ? '
And it was not for myself I was asking
this praise. Beloved, I was wearing the
magic rose — what you gave me when
we parted : you saying, alas, that you
were not to be there. But you were\
Its leaves have not dropped nor the
scent of it faded. I kiss you out of the
heart of it. Good-night : come to me in
my first dream 1
LOVE-LETTERS 41
LETTER XII
Dearest, — It has been such a funny
day from post-time onwards : — congra-
tulations on the great event are begin-
ning to arrive in envelopes and on
wheels. Some are very kind and dear ;
and some are not so — only the ordi
nary seemliness of polite sniffle-snaffle.
Just after you had gone yesterday,
Mrs. called and was told the news.
Of course she knew of you : but didn't
think she had ever seen you. ' Probably
he passed you at the gates,' I said.
* What ? ' she went off with a view-
halloo ; ' that well-dressed sort of young
fellow in grey, and a moustache, and
knowing how to ride ? Met us in the
lane. Well, my dear, I do congratu-
late you ! '
And whether it was by the grey suit,
or the moustache, or the knowing how
42 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
to ride that her congratulations were so
emphatically secured, I know not !
Others are yet more quaint, and more
to my liking. Nan-nan is Nan-nan : I
cannot let you off what she said ! No
tears or sentiment came from her to
prevent me laughing: she brisked like
an old war-horse at the first word of
it, and blessed God that it had come
betimes, that she might be a nurse
again in her old age ! She is a true
'Mrs. Berry,' and is ready to make
room for you in my affections for the
sake of far-oflP divine events, which pro-
mise renewed youth to her old bones.
Roberts, when he brought me my
pony this morning, touched his hat
quick twice over to show that the news
brimmed in his body : and a very nice
cordial way of showing, I thought it!
He was quite ready to talk when I let
him go ; and he gave me plenty of good
fun. He used to know you when he
was in service at the H s, and speaks
of you as being then 'a gallons young
hound,' whatever that may mean. I
imagine 'gallous' to be a rustic Lewis
Carroll compound, made up in equal
LOVE-LETTERS 43
parts of callousness and gallantry, which
most boys are, at some stage of their
existence.
What tales will you be getting of me
out of Nan-nan, some day behind my
back, I wonder? There is one I shall
forbid her to reveal : it shall be part
of my marriage-portion to show you
early that you have got a wife with a
temper !
Here is a whole letter that must end
now, — and the great Word never men-
tioned ! It is good for you to be put
upon maigre fare, for once. I ho/d my
pen back with both hands : it wants so
much to gii^e you the forbidden treat.
Oh, the serpent in the garden ! See
where it has underlined its meaning.
Frailty, thy name is a J pen !
Adieu, adieu, remember me.
44 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER XITI
The letters ? No, Beloved, I could not !
Not yet. There you have caught me
where I own I am still shy of you.
A long time hence, when we are a
safely wedded pair, you shall turn them
over. It may be a short time ; but I
will keep them however long. Indeed
I must ever keep them ; they talk to
me of the dawn of my existence, — the
early light before our sun rose, when
my love of you was growing and had
not yet reached its full.
If I disappoint you I will try to make
up for it with something I wrote long
before I ever saw you. To-day I was
turning over old things my mother had
treasured for me of my childhood — of
days spent with her : things of laughter
as well as of tears ; such a dear selec-
tion, so quaint and sweet, with moods
T.OVE-LETTERS 45
of her as I dimly remember her to
have been. And amono; them was this
absurdity, written, and I suppose placed
in the mouth of my stocking, the Christ-
mas I stayed with her in France. I
remember the time as a great treat, but
nothing of this. ' Nilgoes ' is ' Nicholas,'
you must understand ! How he must
have laughed over me asleep while he
read this !
' Cher pere Nilgoes. S'il vous plait voulez
vous me donne plus de jeux que des oranges
des pommes et des pombons pare que nous allons
faire Tarbre de noel cette anne et les jeaux ferait
mieux pour Tarbre de Noel. II ne faut pas dire
a petite mere s'il vous plait parce que je ne
veut pas quelle sache sil vous voulez venir ce
soir du ceil pour que vous pouvez me donner
ce que je vous demande Dites bon jour a la
St. Viearge est a Tenfant Jeuscs et a Ste
Joseph. Adieu cher St. Nilgoes.'
1 haven't altered the spelling, I love it
too well, prophetic of a fault I still
carry about me. How strange that
little bit of invocation to the dear folk
above sounds to me now ! My mother
must have been teaching me things after
her own persuasion ; most naturally, poor
46 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
dear one — though that too has gone like
water off my mind. It was one of the
troubles between her and my father :
the compact that I was to be brought
up a Catholic was dissolved after they
separated; and I am sorry, thinking it
unjust to her ; yet glad, content with
being what I am.
I must have been less than five when
I penned this : I was always a letter-
writer, it seems.
It is a reproach now from many that
I have ceased to be: and to them I
fear it is true. That I have not truly
ceased, * witness under my hand these
presents,' — or whatever may be the pro-
per legal terms for an affidavit.
What were you like. Beloved, as a
very small child ? Should I have loved
you from the beginning had we toddled
to the rencounter; and would my love
have passed safely through the ' gallous
young hound ' period ; and could I love
you more now in any case, had I all
your days treasured up in my heart,
instead of less than a year of them ?
How strangely much have seven miles
kept our fates apart! It seems un-
LOVE-LETTERS 47
characteristic for this small world, —
where meetings come about so far above
the dreams of average — to have played
us such a prank.
This must do for this once, Beloved ;
for behold me busy to-day : with what,
I shall not tell you. I would like to
put you to a test, as ladies did their
knights of old, and hardly ever do now
— fearing, I suppose, lest the species
should altogether fail them at the pinch.
I would like to see if you could come
here and sit with me from beginning
to end, with your eyes shut : never once
opening them. I am not saying whether
I think curiosity, or affection, would
make the attempt too difficult. But if
you were sure you could, you might
come here to-morrow — a day otherwise
interdicted. Only know, having come,
that if you open those dear cupboards
of vision and set eyes on things not
yet intended to be looked at, there
will be confusion of tongues in this
Tower we are building whose top is to
reach heaven. Will you come ? I don't
say ' come ' ; I only want to know —
will you ?
48 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
To-day my love flies low over the
earth like a swallow before rain, and
touching the tops of the flowers has
culled vou these. Kiss them until they
open : they are full of my thoughts, as
the world, to me, is full of you.
LOVE-LETTERS 49
LETTER XIV
Own Dearest, — Come I did not think
that you would, or mean that you should
seriously ; for is it not a poor way of love
to make the object of it cut an absurd or
partly absurd figure ? I wrote only as a
woman having a secret on the tip of her
tongue and the tips of her fingers, and
full of a longing to say it and send it.
Here it is at last : love me for it, I
have worked so hard to get it done ! And
you do not know why and what for ?
Beloved, it — this — is the anniversary of
the day we first met ; and you have
forgotten it already or never remembered
it :— and yet have been clamouring for
' the letters ' I
On the first anniversary of our mar-
riage, if you remember it, you shall have
those same letters : and not otherwise.
So there they lie safe till doomsday I
D
50 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
The M.A. has been very gracious and
dear after her little outbreak of yester-
day : her repentances, after I have hurt
her feelings, are so gentle and sweet,
they always fill me with compunction.
Finding that I would go on with the
thing I was doing, she volunteered to
come and read to me : a requiem over
the bone of contention which we had
gnawed between us. Was not that pretty
and charitable ? She read Tennyson's
Life for a solid hour, and continued it
to-day. Isn't it funny that she should
take up such a book ? — she who * can't
abide ' Tennyson or Browning or Shake-
speare : only likes Byron, I suppose be-
cause it was the right and fashionable
liking when she was young. Yet she is
plodding through the Life religiously —
only skipping the verses.
I have come across two little specimens
of ' Death and the child ' in it. His
son, Lionel, was carried out in a blanket
one night in the great comet year, and
waking up under the stars asked,
' Am I dead ? ' Number two is of a
little girl at Wellington's funeral who
saw his charger carrying his boots.
LOVE-LETTERS 51
and asked, ' Shall I be like that after
I die ? '
A queer old lady came to lunch yester-
day, a great traveller, though lame on
two crutches. We carefully hid all
guide-books and maps, and held our
peace about next month, lest she should
insist on cominsc too : thouo-h I think
IS'ineveh was the place she was most
anxious to go to, if the JNl.A. would
consent to accompany her !
Good-bye, dearest of one-year-old ac-
quaintances ! you, too, send your bless-
ing on the anniversary, now that my
better memory has reminded you of it !
All that follow we will bless in company.
I trust you are one-half as happy as I am,
my own, my own.
52 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER XV
You told me, dearest, that I should find
your mother formidable. It is true; I
did. She is a person very much in the
grand pagan style : I admire it, but I
cannot flow in that sort of company, and
I think she meant to crush me. You
were very wise to leave her to come
alone.
I like her : I mean I believe that under
that terribleness she has a heart of gold,
which once opened would never shut :
but she has not opened it to me. I
believe she could have a great charity,
that no evil-doing would dismay her :
* staunch ' sums her up. But I have
done nothing wrong enough yet to bring
me into her good graces. Loving her
son, even, though, I fear, a great offence,
has done me no good turn.
LOVE-LETTERS 53
Perhaps that is her inconsistency ;
women are sure to be inconsistent some-
where : it is their birthright.
I began to study her at once, to find
you : it did not take long. How I could
love her, if she would let me !
You know her far far better than I, and
want no advice : otherwise I would say
— never praise me to her ; quote my follies
rather ! To give ground for her distaste
to revel in will not deepen me in her bad
books so much as attempts to warp her
judgment.
I need not go through it all : she will
have told you all that is to the purpose
about our meeting. She bristled in, a
brave old fighting figure, announcing
compulsion in every line, but with all her
colours flying. She waited for the door
to close, then said, ' My son has bidden
me come, I suppose it is my duty : he is
his own master now.'
We only shook hands. Our talk was
very little of you. I showed her all the
horses, the dogs, and the poultry ; she
let the inspection appear to conclude
with myself: asked me my habits, and
said 1 looked healthy. I owned I felt it.
54 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
* Looks and feelings are the most decep-
tive things in the world,' she told me;
adding that ' poor stock ' got more than
its share of these. And when she said it
I saw quite plainly that she meant me.
I wonder where she gets the notion :
for we are a long-lived race, both sides of
the family. I guessed that she would
like frankness, and was as frank as 1
could be, pretending no deference to her
objections. 'You think you suit each
other ? ' she asked me. My answer, * He
suits me ! ' pleased her maternal palate,
I think. ' Any girl might say that ! '
she admitted. (She might indeed !)
This is the part of our interview she
will not have repeated to you.
I was due at Hillyn when she was
preparing to go : Aunt N came in,
and I left her to do the honours while I
shpped on my habit. I rode by your
mother's carriacre as far as the Green-
way, where we branched. I suppose
that is what her phrase means that
you quote about my * making a trophy
of her,' and marching her a prisoner
across the borders before all the
world I
LOVE-LETTERS 55
I do like her : she is worth winning.
Can one say warmer of a future mother-
in-law who stands hostile ?
All the same it was an ordeal. I
beheve I have wept since : for Benjy
scratched my door often yesterday even-
ing, and looked most wistful when I
came out. Merely paltry self-love,
dearest : — I am so little accustomed to
not being — liked.
I think she will be more gracious in
her own house. I have her formal word
that I am to come. Soon, not too soon,
I will come over ; and you shall meet
me, and take me to see her. There is
something in her opposition that I can't
fathom : I wondered twice was lunacy
her notion : she looked at me so hard.
My mother's seclusion and living apart
from us was not on that account. I
often saw her : she was very dear and
sweet to me, and had quiet eyes the
very reverse of a person mentally de-
ranged. My father, I know, went to
visit her when she lay dying; and I
remember we all wore mourning. My
uncle has told me they had a deep regard
for each other : but disagreed, and were
56 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
independent enough to choose living
apart.
I do not remember my father ever
speaking of her to us as children : but
I am sure there was no state of health
to be concealed.
Last night I was talking to Aunt
N about her. * A very dear woman,'
she told me, ' but your father was never
so much alive to her worth as the rest
of us.' Of him she said, * A dear, fine
fellow : but not at all easy to get on
with.' Him, of course, I have a con-
tinuous recollection of, and ' a fine
fellow' we did think him. My mother
comes to me more rarely, at intervals.
Don't talk me down your mother's
throat : but tell her as much as she cares
to know of this. I am very proud of
my * stock ' which she thinks * poor ' 1
Dear, how much I have written on
things which can never concern us
finally, and so should not ruffle us while
they last ! Hold me in your heart
always, always ; and the world may turn
adamant to me for aught I care 1 Be in
my dreams to night I
LOVE-LETTERS 67
LETTER XVI
But, Dearest, — When I think of you
I never question whether what I think
would be true or false in the eyes of
others. All that concerns you seems to
go on a different plane where evidence
has no meaning or existence : where no-
body exists or means anything, but only
we two alone, enfraffed in brinoing about
for ourselves the still greater solitude
of two into one. Oh, Beloved, what a
company that will be ! Take me in your
arms, fasten me to your heart, breathe
on me. Deny me either breath or the
light of day : I am yours equally, to live
or die at your word. I shut my eyes to
feel your kisses falling on me like rain,
or still more like sunshine, — yet most of
all like kisses, my own dearest and best
beloved !
Oh, we two I how wonderful we seeml
58 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
And to think that there have been
lovers like us since the world began : and
the world not able to tell us one little
word of it : — not well, so as to be believed
— or only along with sadness where Fate
has broken up the heavens which lay
over some pair of lovers. (Enone's cry,
* Ah me, my mountain shepherd,' 'tells
us of the joy when it has vanished, and
most of all I get it in that song of wife
and husband which ends : —
* Not a word for you,
Not a lock or kiss,
Good-bye.
We, one, must part in two ;
Verily death is this :
I must die.'
It was a woman wrote that: and we
get love there ! Is it only when joy is
past that we can give it its full ex-
pression ? Even now. Beloved, I break
down in trying to say how I love you.
I cannot put all my joy into my words,
nor all my love into my lips, nor all my
life into your arms, whatever way I try.
Something remains that I cannot express.
Believe, dearest, that the half has not yet
been spoken, neither of my love for you,
LOVE-LETTERS 69
nor of my trust in you, — nor of a wish
that seems sad, but comes in a very
tumult of happiness — the wish to die so
that some unknown good may come to
you out of me.
Not till you die, dearest, shall I die
truly ! I love you now too much for
your heart not to carry me to its grave,
though I should die now, and you live
to be a hundred. I pray you may !
I cannot choose a day for you to die.
I am too grateful to life which has given
me to you to say — if I were dying —
' Come with me, dearest 1 ' Though, how
the words tempt me as I write them ! —
Come with me, dearest : yes, come ! Ah,
but you kiss me more, I think, when we
say good-bye than when meeting ; so you
will kiss me most of all when I have to
die : — a thing in death to look forward
to! And, till then, — life, life, till I am
out of my depth in happiness and drown
in your arms !
Beloved, that I can write so to you, —
think what it means ; what you have
made me come through in the way of
love, that this, which I could not have
dreamed before, comes from me with
60 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
the thought of you ! You told me to
be still — to let you ' worship ' : I was to
write back acceptance of ail your dear
words. Are you never to be at my feet,
you ask. Indeed, dearest, I do not know
how, for I cannot move from where I
am ! Do you feel where my thoughts
kiss you ? You would be vexed with me
if I wrote it down, so I do not. And
after all, some day, under a bright star
of Providence, 1 may have gifts for you
after my own mind which will allow me
to grow proud. Only now all the giving
comes from you. It is I who am en-
riched by your love, beyond knowledge
of my former self. Are you changed,
dearest, by anything I have done ?
My heart goes to you like a tree in
the wind, and all these thoughts are loose
leaves that fly after you when I have to
remain behind. Dear lover, what short
visits yours seem ! and the jMother-Aunt
tells me they are most unconscionably
long. — You will not pay any attention
to that, please : for ever let the heavens
fall rather than that a hint to such foul
effect should grow operative through
me I
LOVE-LETTERS 61
This brings you me so far as it can : —
such little words off so great a body of
— ' liking ' shall I call it ? My paper
stops me : it is my last sheet : T should
have to go down to the library to get
more — else I think I could not cease
writinfj.
More love than I can name. — Ever.
dearest, your own.
62 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER XVII
Dearest, — Do I not write you long
letters? It reveals my weakness. I
have thought (it had been coming on
me, and now and then had broken out
of me before I met you) that, left to
myself, I should have become a writer of
books — I scarcely can guess what sort —
and gone contentedly into middle-age
with that instead of this as my raison
d'etre.
How gladly I lay down that part of
myself, and say — ' But for you, I had
been this quite other person, whom I
have no wish to be now ' ! Beloved, your
heart is the shelf where I put all my
uncut volumes, wondering a little what
sort of a writer I should have made ; and
chiefly wondering, would you have liked
me in that character ?
There is one here in the family who
LOVE-LETTERS 63
considers me a writer of the darkest dye,
and does not approve of it. Benjy comes
and sits most mournfully facing me when
I settle down on a sunny morning, such
as this, to write : and inquires, with all
the dumbness a dog is capable of —
*What has come between us, that you
fill up your time and mine with those
cat's-claw scratchings, when you should
be in your woodland dress running [with]
me through damp places ? '
Having written this sentimental mean-
ing into his eyes, and Benjy still sitting
watching me, I was seized with ruth for
my neglect of him, and took him to see
his mother's gi-ave. At the bottom of
the long walk is our dog's cemetery ; —
no tombstones, but mounds ; and a dog-
rose grows there and flourishes as no-
where else. It was my fancy as a child
to have it planted : and I declare to you,
it has taken wonderfully to the notion,
as if it knew that it had relations of a
higher species under its keeping. Benjy,
too, has a profound air of knowing, and
never scratches for bones there, as he
does in other places. What horror, were
I to find him digging up his mother's
64 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
skeleton ! Would my esteem for him
survive ?
When we got there to-day, he depre-
cated my choice of locality, asking what
I had brought him there for. I pointed
out to him the precise mound which
covered the object of his earliest affec-
tions, and gathered you these buds. Are
they not a deep colour for wild ones ? —
if their blush remains a fixed state till
the post brings them to you.
Through what flower would you like
best to be passed back, as regards your
material atoms, into the spiritualised side
of nature, when we have done with our-
selves in this life ? No single flower
quite covers all my wants and aspira-
tions. You and I would put our heads
together underground and evolve a new
flower — * carnation, lily, lily, rose ' — and
send it up one fine morning for scientists
to dispute over and give diabolical learned
names to. What an end to our cosy
floral collaboration that would be !
Here endeth the epistle : the elect
salutes you. This week, if the authori-
ties permit, 1 shall be paying you a fly-
ing visit, with wings full of eyes, — and,^
LOVE-LETTERS 65
I hope, healing; for I believe you are
seedy, and that that is what is behind
it. You notice I have not complained.
Dearest, how could I ! My happiness
reaches to the clouds — that is, to where
things are not quite clear at present. I
love you no more than I ought : yet far
more than I can name. Good-nig-ht and
good-morning. — Your star, since you call
me so.
E
66 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER XV III
Dearest, — Not having had a letter from
you this morning, I have read over some
back ones, and find in one a bidding
which I have never fulfilled, to tell you
what I do all day. Was that to avoid
the too great length of my telling you
what I think ? Yet you get more of me
this way than that. What I do is every
day so much the same : while what I
think is always different. However, since
you want a woman of action rather than
of brain, here I start telling you.
I wake punctual and hungry at the
sound of Nan-nan's drawing of the blinds :
wait till she is gone (the old darling
potters and tattles : it is her most posses-
sive moment of me in the day, except
when I sham headaches, and let her put
me to bed) ; then I have my hand under
my pillow and draw out your last for a
LOVE-LETTERS 67
reading that has lost count whether it
is the twenty-second or the fifty-second
time; — discover new beauties in it, and
run to the glass to discover new beauties
in myself, — find them ; Benjy comes up
with the post's latest, and behold, my day
is begun !
Is that the sort of thing you want to
know ? jNIy days are without an action
w^orth naming : I only think swelUng
thoughts, and write some of them : if ever
I do anything worth telling, be sure I
run a pen-and-ink race to tell you. No,
it is man w^ho does things ; a woman only
diddles (to adapt a word of diminutive
sound for the occasion), unless, good,
fortunate, independent thing, she w^orks
for her own living : and that is not me !
I feel sometimes as if a real bar were
between me and a whole conception of
life ; because I have carpets and curtains,
and Nan -nan, and Benjy, and last of all
you — shutting me out from the realities
of existence.
If you would all leave me just for one
full moon, and come back to me only
when I was starving for you all — for my
tea to be brought to me in the morning,
68 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
and all the paddings and cushionings
which bolster me up from morning till
night — with what a sigh of wisdom I
would drop back into your arms, and
would let you draw the rose-coloured
curtains round me again !
Now I am afraid lest I have become
too happy : I am leaning so far out of
window to welcome the dawn, I seem to
be tempting a fall — heaven itself to fall
upon me.
What do I know truly, who only know
so much happiness ?
Dearest, if there is anything else in
love which I do not know, teach it me
quickly : I am utterly yours. If there is
sorrow to give, give it me ! Only let
me have with it the consciousness of
your love.
Oh, my dear, I lose myself if I think
of you so much. What would life have
without you in it ? The sun would drop
from my heavens. I see only by you !
you have kissed me on the eyes. You
are more to me than my own poor brain
could ever have devised : had I started
to invent Paradise, I could not have
invented you. But perhaps you have
LOVE-LETTERS 69
invented me : I am something new to
myself since I saw you first. God bless
you for it !
Even if you were to shut your eyes at
me now — though I might go blind, you
could not unmake me : — ' The gods
themselves cannot recall their gifts.'
Also that I am yours is a gift of the
gods, I will trust : and so, not to be
recalled I
Kiss me, dearest; here where I have
written this ! I am yours, Beloved. I
kiss you again and again. — Ever your
own making.
70 AN ENGLISHWOIMAN'S
LETTER XIX
Dearest, Dearest, — How long has this
happened ? You don't tell me the day
or the hour. Is it ever since you last
wrote ? Then you have been in pain and
grief for four days : and I not knowing
anything about it ! And you have no
hand in the house kind enough to let you
dictate by it one small word to poor me ?
What heartless merrymakings may I
not have sent you to worry you, when
soothing was the one thing wanted?
Well, I will not worry now, then ;
neither at not being told, nor at not
bein^c allowed to come : but I will come
thus and thus, O my dear heart, and
take you in my arms. And you will be
comforted, will you not be ? when I tell
you that even if you had no legs at all, I
would love you just the same. Indeed,
dearest, so much of you is a superfluity :
LOVE-LETTERS 71
just your heart against mine, and the
sound of your voice, would carry me up
to more heavens than I could otherwise
have dreamed of. I may say now, now
that I know it was not your choice, what
a void these last few days the lack of
letters has been to me. I wondered, truly,
if you had found it well to put off such
visible signs for a while in order to appease
one who, in other things more essential,
sees you rebellious. But the wonder is
over now ; and 1 don't want you to write
— not till a consultation of doctors orders
it for the good of your health. I will be
so happy talking to you : also I am send-
ing you books : — those I wish you to read ;
and which now you must, since you have
the leisure ! And I for my part will make
time and read yours. Whose do you
most want me to read, that my education
in your likings may become complete ?
What I send you will not deprive me or
anything : for I have the beautiful com-
plete set — your gift — and shall read side
by side with you to realise in imagina-
tion what the happiness of reading them
for a first time ought to be.
Yesterday, by a most unsympathetic
72 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
instinct, I went out for a long tramp on
my two feet : and no ache in them came
and told me of you ! Over Sillingford
I sat on a bank and looked downhill
where went a carter. And I looked up-
hill where lay something which might be
nothing — or not his. Now, shall I make
a fool of myself by pursuing to tell him
he may have dropped something, or shall
I go on and see ? So I went on and saw
a coat with a fat pocket : and by then he
was out of sight, and perhaps it wasn't
his ; and it was very hot and the hill
steep. So I minded my own business,
making Cain's motto mine ; and now feel
so bad, being quite sure that it was
his. And I wonder how many miles
he will have tramped back looking for
it, and whether his dinner was in the
pocket.
These unintentional misdoings are the
' sins ' one repents of all one's life long ;
I have others stored away, the bitterest
of small things done or undone in haste
and repented of at so much leisure after-
wards. And always done to people or
things I had no grudge against, some-
times even a love for. They are my
LOVE-LETTERS 73
skeletons : I will tell you of them some
day.
This, dearest, is our first enforced
absence from each other ; and I feel it
almost more hard on me than on you.
Beloved, let us lay our hearts together
and get comforted. It is not real separa-
tion to know that another part of the
world contains the rest of me. Oh, the
rest of me, the rest of me that you are !
So, thinking of you, I can never be tired.
I rest yours.
74 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER XX
Yes, Dearest, ' Patience ! ' but it is a
virtue I have little enough of naturally,
and used to be taught to pray for as
a child. And I remember once really
hurting dear Mother- Aunt's feelings by
trying to repay her for that teaching by
a little iniquitous laughter at her expense.
It was too funny for me to feel very
contrite about, as I do sometimes over
quite small things, or I would not be
telling it you now (for there are things in
me I would conceal even from you). I
daresay you wouldn't guess it, but the
M.A. is a most long person over her
private devotions. Perhaps it was her
own habit, with the cares of a household
sometimes conflicting, which made her
recite to me so often her pet legend of a
saintly person who, constantly interrupted
LOVE-LETTERS 75
over her prayers by mundane matters,
became a pattern in patience out of these
snippings of her godly desires. So, one
day, angels in the disguise of cross
people with selfish demands on her time
came seeking to know where in her com-
position or composure exasperation began :
and finding none, they let her return in
peace to her missal, where for a reward
all the letters had been turned into gold.
' And that, my dear, comes of patience,'
my aunt would say, till I grew a little
tired of the saying. I don't know
what experience my uncle had gathered
of her patience under like circum-
stances : but I notice that to this day
he treads delicately, like Agag, when
he knows her to be on her knees ; and
prefers then to send me on his errands
instead of doing them himself.
So it happened one day that he
wanted a particular coat which had
been put away in her clothes-closet —
and she was on her knees between him
and it, with the time of her Amen
quite indefinite. I was sent, said my
errand briefiy, and was permitted to
76 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
fumble out her keys from her pocket
while she continued to kneel over her
mornmg psalms.
What I brought to him turned out to
be the wrong coat : I went back and
knocked for readmittance. Long-suf-
feringly she bade me to come in. I ex-
plained, and still she repressed herself,
only saying in a tone of affliction, 'Do
see this time that you take the right
one
After I had made my second selection,
and proved it right on my uncle's person,
the parallelism of things struck me, and
I skipped back to my aunt's door and
tapped. I got a low wailing ' Yes ? '
for answer — a monosyllabic substitute
for the ' How long, O Lord ? ' of a
saint in difficulties. When I called
through the keyhole, ' Are your psalms
written in gold ? ' she became really
angry : — I suppose because the miracle
so well earned had not come to pass.
Well, dearest, if you have been patient
with me over so much about nothing, I
pray this letter may appear to you written
in gold. Why I write so is, partly, that
it is bad for us both to be down in the
LOVE-LETTERS 77
mouth, or with hearts down at heel : and
so, since you cannot, I have to do the
dancing : — and, partly, because T found I
had a bad temper on me which needed
curing, and being brought to the sun-go-
down point of owdng no man anything.
Which, sooner said, has finally been
done ; and I am very meek now and
loving to you, and everything belonging
to you — not to come nearer the sore
point.
And I hope some day, some day, as a
reward to my present submission, that
you will sprain your ankle in my com-
pany (just a very little bit for an excuse)
and let me have the nursing of it ! It
hurts my heart to have your poor bones
crying out for comfort that I am not to
bring to them. I feel robbed of a part
of my domestic training, and may never
pick up what I have just lost. And I
fear greatly you must have been truly in
pain to have put off INIeredith for a day.
If I had been at hand to read to you, I
Hatter myself you would have liked him
well, and been soothed. You must take
the will. Beloved, for the deed. I kiss
you now, as much as even you can
78 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
demand ; and when you get this I will be
thinking of you all over again. — When
do I ever leave off? Love, love, love,
tiU our next meeting, and then more love
still, and more ! — Ever your own.
LOVE-LETTERS 79
LETTER XXI
Dearest, — I am in a simple mood to-day,
and give you the benefit of it : I shall
become complicated again presently, and
you will hear from me directly that
happens.
The house only emptied itself this
morning ; I may say emptied, for the
remainder fits like a saint into her niche,
and is far too comfortable to count. This
is C , whom you only once met, when
she sat so much in the background that
you will not remember her. She has one
weakness, a thirst between meals — the
blameless thirst of a rabid teetotaler.
She hides cups of cold tea about the
place, as a dog its bones : now and then
one gets spilled or sat on, and when she
hears of the accident, she looks thirsty,
with a thirst which only that particular cup
of tea could have quenched. In no other
80 AN ENGLISHWOMAN S
way is she any trouble : indeed, she is a
great dear, and has the face of a Madonna,
as beautiful as an apocryphal gospel to
look at and ' make believe ' in.
Arthur, too, like the rest of them,
when he came over to give me his
brotherly blessing, wished to know what
you were like. I didn't pretend to
remember your outward appearance too
well, — told him you looked like a common
or garden Englishman, and roused his
suspicions by so careless a championship
of my choice. He accused me of being
in reality highly sentimental about you,
and with having at that moment your
portrait concealed and strung round my
neck in a locket. Mother- Aunt stood up
for me against him, declaring I was 'too
sensible a girl for nonsense of that sort.'
(It is a little weakness of hers, you know,
to resent extremes of endearment towards
any one but herself in those she has
'brooded,' and she has thought us hitherto
most restrained and proper — as, indeed,
have we not been?) Arthur and I ex-
changed tokens of truce : in a little while
off went my aunt to bed, leaving us alone.
Then, for he is the one of us that I am most
LOVE-LETTERS 81
frank with : ' Arthur/ cried I, and up
came your little locket like a bucket from
a well, for him to have his first sight of
you, my Beloved. He objected that he
could not see faces in a nutshell ; and I
suppose others cannot : only I.
He, too, is gone. If you had been
coming he would have spared another
day — for to-day was planned and dated,
you will remember — and we would have
ridden half-way to meet you. But, as
fate has tripped you, and made all
comings on your part indefinite, he sends
you his hopes for a later meeting.
How is your poor foot ? I suppose,
as it is ill, I may send it a kiss by post
and wish it well ? I do. Truly, you are
to let me know if it gives you much pain,
and I will lie awake thinking of you.
This is not sentimental, for if one knows
that a friend is occupied over one's
sleeplessness one feels the comfort.
I am perplexed how else to give you
my company : your mother, I know,
could not yet truly welcome me ; and I
wish to be as patient as possible, and not
push for favours that are not offered.
So I cannot come and ask to take you
F
82 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
out in her carriage, nor come and carry
you away in mine. We must try how
fast we can hold hands at a distance.
I have kept up to where you have been
reading in Richard Feverel, though it
has been a scramble : for I have less
opportunity of reading, I with my feet,
than you without yours. In your book
I have just got to the smuggling away
of General Monk in the perforated coffin,
and my sense of history capitulates in
an abandonment of laughter. I yield!
The Gaul's invasion of Britain always
becomes broad farce when he attempts it.
This in clever ludicrousness beats the
unintentional comedy of Victor Hugo's
' John- Jim- Jack ' as a name typical of
Anglo-Saxon christenhigs. But Dumas,
through a dozen absurdities, knows appar-
ently how to stalk his quarry : so large a
genius may play the fool and remain wise.
You see I have given your author a
warm welcome at last : and what about
you and mine ? Tell me you love his
women and I will not be jealous. Indeed,
outside him I don't know where to find
a written English w^oman of modern
times whom I would care to meet, or
LOVE-LETl^ERS 83
could feel honestly bound to look up to :
— nowhere will I have her shaking her
ringlets at me in Dickens or Thackeray.
Scott is simply not modern ; and Hardy's
women, if they have nobility in them,
get so cruelly broken on the wheel that
you get but the wrecks of them at last.
It is only his charming baggages who
come to a good ending.
I like an author who has the courage and
self-restraint to leave his noble creations
alive : too many try to ennoble them by
death. For my part, if I have to go
out of life before you, I would gladly
trust you to the hands of Clara, or Rose,
or Janet, or most of all Vittoria ; though,
to be accurate, I fear they have all
growm too old for you by now.
And you ? have you any men to offer
me in turn out of your literary admira-
tions, supposing you should die of a
snapped ankle ? Would you give me
to d'Artagnan for instance ? Hardly,
I suspect ! But either choose me some
proxy hero, or get well and come to
me ! You will be very welcome when
you do. Sleep is making sandy eyes at
me : good-night, dearest.
84 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER XXII
Why, my Beloved, — Since you put it
to me as a point of conscience (it is only
lying on your back with one active leg
doing nothing, and the other dying to
have done aching, which has made you
take this new start of inquiring within
upon everything), since you call on me
for a conscientious answer, I say that it
stands to reason that I love you more
than you love me, because there is so
much more of you to love, let alone fit
for loving.
Do you imagine that you are going to
be a cripple for life, and therefore an
indifferent dancer in the dances I shall
always be leading you, that you have
started this fit of self-depreciation ? Or
is it because I have thrown JNIeredith
at your sick head that you doubt my
tact and my affection, and my power
LOVE-LETTERS 85
patiently to bear for your sake a good
deal of cold shoulder ? Dearest, re-
member I am doctoring you from a
distance : and am not yet allowed to
come and see my patient, so can only
judge from your letters how ill you are.
That you have been concealing from me
almost treacherously : and only by a
piece of abject waylaying did I receive
word to-day of your sleepless nights, and
so get the key to your symptoms. Lay
by Meredith, then, for a w^hile: I am
sending you a cargo of Stevenson instead.
You have been truly unkind, trying to
read what required effort, when you were
fit for nothing of the sort.
And lest even Stevenson should be too
much for you, and wanting very mucli,
and perhaps a little bit jealously, to be
your most successful nurse, I am letting
my last large bit of shyness of you go ;
and with a pleasant sort of pain, because
I know I have hit on a thing that will
please you, I open my hands and let you
have these, and with them goes my last
bUish : henceforth I am a woman without
a secret, and all your interest in me may
e\ aporate. Yet I know well it will not.
86 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
As for this resurrection pie from love's
dead-letter office, you will find from it
at least one thing — how much I depended
upon response from you before I could
become at all articulate. It is you,
dearest, from the beginning who have
set my head and heart free and made
me a woman. I am something quite
different from the sort of child I was less
than a year ago when I wrote that small
prayer which stands sponsor for all that
follows. How abundantly it has been
answered, dearest Beloved, only I know :
you do not !
Now my prayer is not that you should
* come true,' but that you should get
well. Do this one little thing for me,
dearest! For you I Avill do anything:
my happiness waits for that. As yet
I seem to have done nothing. Oh, but,
Beloved, I will ! From a reading of the
Fioretti, I sign myself as I feel. — Your
glorious poor little one.
LOVE-LETTERS 87
THE CASKET LETTERS
my dear Prince Wonderful,*
Pray God bless and make him
come true for my sake. Amen.
E.S.V.P.
B
Dear Prince Wonderful, — Now that
I have met you I pray that you will be
my friend. I want just a little of your
friendship, but that, so much, so much !
And even for that little I do not know
how to ask.
Always to be yovr friend : of that you
shall be quite sure.
* The MS. contained at first no name, but a blank :
over it this has been written afterward ~ in a small
hand.
88 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
Dear Prince Wonderful, — Long ago
when I was still a child I told myself of
you : but thought of you only as in a fairy
tale. Now I am afraid of trusting my
eyes or my ears, for fear I should think
too much of you before I know you
really to be true. Do not make me wish
so much to be your friend, unless you
are also going to be true !
Please come true now, for mine and
for all the world's sake : — but for mine
especially, because I thought of you
first ! And if you are not able to come
true, don't make me see you any more.
I shall always remember you, and be
glad that I have seen you just once.
D
Dear Prince Wonderful, — Has God
blessed you yet and made you come true ?
I have not seen you again, so how am I
to know? Not that it is necessary for
me to know even if you do come true.
I believe already that you are true.
If \ were never to see you again I
LOVE-LETTERS 89
should be glad to think of you as living,
and shall always be your friend. I pray
that you may come to know that.
E
Dear Highness, — I do not know what
to write to you : I only know how much
I wish to write. I have always written
the things I thought about : it has been
easy to find words for them. Now I
think about you, but have no words : — no
words, dear Highness, for you I I could
write at once if I knew you were my
friend. Come true for me : 1 will have
so much to tell you then !
Dear Highness, — If I believe in fairy
tales coming true, it is because I am
superstitious. This is what I did to-day.
I shut my eyes and took a book from
the shelf, opened it, and put my fingers
down on a page. This is what I came to :
*A11 I believed is true i
I am able yet
All I want to get
By a method as strange as new :
Dare I trust the same to you ? '
90 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
Fate says, then, you are to be my friend.
Fate has said I am yours ah*eady. That
is very certain. Only in real life where
things come true would a book have
opened as this has done.
G
Dear Highness, — I am sure now,
then, that I please you, and that you
like me, perhaps only a little : for you
turned out of your way to ride with me
though you were going somewhere so
fast. How much I wished it when I
saw you coming, but dared not believe
it would come true !
' Come true ' : it is the word I have
always been writing, and everything
has'. — you most of all! You are more
true each time I see you. So true that
now I will write it down at last, — the
truth for you who have come so true.
Dear Highness and Great Heart, I
love you dearly, though you don't know
it, — quite ever so much ; and am going
to love you ever so much more, only —
please like me a little better first! You
on your dear side must do something :
LOVE-LETTERS 91
or, before I know, I may be wringing my
hands all alone on a desert island to a
bare blue horizon, with nothing in it real
or fabulous.
If I am to love you, nothing but hap-
piness is to be allowed to come of it. So
don't come true too fast without one
little wee corresponding wish for me to
find that you are ! I am quite happy
thinking you out slowly : it takes me all
day long ; the longer the better !
I wonder how often in my life I shall
write down that I love you, having once
written it (I do: — I love you! there [it]
is for you, with more to follow after ! ) ;
and send you my love as I do now into
the great emptiness of chance, hoping
somehow, known or unknown, it may
bless you and bring good to you.
Oh, but 'tis a windy world, and I a
mere feather in it : how can I get blown
the wav I would ?
Still I have a superstition that some
star is over me Avhich I have not seen
yet, but shall, — Heaven helping me.
And now good-night, and no more, no
more at all ! I send out an ' I love you '
to be my celestial commercial traveller
92 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
for me while I fold myself up and be-
come its sleeping partner.
Good - night : you are the best and
truest that I ever dreamed yet.
H
Dear Highness, — I begin not to be
able to name you anything, for there is
not a word for you that will do ! ' High-
ness ' you are : but that leaves gaps and
coldnesses without end. ' Royal,' yet
much more serene than royal : though
by that I don't mean any detraction
from your royalty, for I never saw a
man carry his invisible crown with so
level a head and no haughtiness at all :
and that is the finest royalty of look
possible.
I look at you and wonder so how you
have grown to this — to have become
king so quietly without any coronation
ceremony. You have thought more
than you should for happiness at your
age ; making me, by that one line in
your forehead, think you were three
years older than you really are. I wish
— if I dare wish you anything different
LOVE-LETTERS 93
— that you were I It makes me uncom-
fortable to remember that I am — what?
Almost half a year your elder as tune
flies : — not really, for your brain was born
long before mine began to rattle in its
shell. You say quite old things, and
quietly, as if you had had them in your
mind ten years already. When you
told me about your two old pensioners,
the blind man and his wife, whom you
brought to so funny a reconciliation, I
felt (' mir war, ich wuszte nicht wie ')
that I would like very much to go blind-
fold led by you : it struck me suddenly
how happy would be a blindfoldness of
perfect trust such as one might have
with your hands on one. I suppose that
is what in religion is called faith : I
haven't it there, my dear ; but I have it
in you now. I love you, beginning to
understand why : at first I did not. I
am ashamed not to have discovered it
earlier. The matter with you is that
you have goodness prevailing in you,
an integrity of goodness, I mean : — a
different thing from there being a where-
abouts for goodness in you ; that we all
have in some proportion or another. I
94 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
was quite right to love you : I know it
now, — I did not when 1 first did.
Yesterday I was turning over a silly
* confession book' in which a rose was
everybody's favourite flower, manliness
the finest quality for a man, and woman-
liness for a woman (which is as much
as to say that pig is the best quality for
pork, and pork for pig) : till I came upon
one different from the others, and found
myself saying * Yes ' all down the page.
I turned over for the signature, and
found my own mother's. Was it not a
strange sweet meeting ? And only then
did the memory of her handwriting from
far back come to me. She died, dear
Highness, before I was seven years old.
I love her as I do my early memory of
flowers, as something very sweet, hardly
as a real person.
I noticed she loved best in men and
women what they lack most often : in a
man, a fair mind ; in a woman, courage.
' Brave women and fair men,' she wrote.
Byron might have turned in his grave at
having his dissolute stifl'-neck so wrung
for him by misquotation. And she — it
must have been before the 'eighties
LOVE-LETTERS 95
had started the popular craze for him —
chose JNIeredith, my own dear ^Meredith,
for her favourite author. How our
tastes would have run together had she
lived !
Well, I know you fair, and believe
myself brave — constitutionally, so that
I can't help it : and this, therefore, is not
self-praise. But fairness in a man is a
deadly hard acquirement, I begin now to
discover. You have it fixed fast in you.
You, I think, began to do just things
consciously, as the burden of manhood
began in you. I love to think of you
growing by degrees till you could carry
your head so — and no other w^ay ; so
that, looking at you, I can promise my-
self you never did a mean thing, and
never consciously an unjust thing except
to yourself. I can just fancy that fault
in you. But, whatever — I love you for
it more and more, and am proud know-
ing you and finding that we are to be-
come friends. For it is that, and no less
than that, now.
I love you ; and me you like cordially :
and that is enough. I need not look
behind it, for already I have no way
96 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
to repay you for the happiness this
brings me.
Oh, I think greatly of you, my dear ;
and it takes long thinking. Not merely
such a quantity of thought, but such a
quality, makes so hard a day's work that
by the end of it I am quite drowsy.
Bless me, dearest; all to-day has be-
longed to you ; and to-morrow, I know,
waits to become yours without the
asking : just as without the asking I
too am yours. I wish it were more
possible for us to give service to those
we love. I am most glad because I see
you so often : but I come and go in your
life emptyhanded, though I have so much
to give away. Thoughts, the best I have,
I give you : I cannot empty my brain of
them. Some day you shall think well of
me. — That is a vow, dear friend, — you
whom I love so much !
T HAVE not had to alter any thought I
ever formed about you, Beloved ; I have
LOVE-LETTERS 97
only had to deepen it — that is all. You
grow, but you remain. I have heard
people talk about you, generally kindly ;
but what they think of you is often
wrong. I do not say anything, but I
am glad, and so sure that I know you
better. If my mind is so clear about
you, it shows that you are good for me.
Now for nearly three months I may not
see you again : but all that time you will
be growing in my heart ; and at the end
without another word from you I shall
find that I know you better than before.
Is that strange ? It is because I love
you : love is knoAvledge — blind know-
ledge, not wanting eyes. I only hope
that I shall keep in your memory the
kind place you have given me. You are
almost my friend now, and I know it.
You do not know that I love you.
K
Beloved, — You love me! I know it
now, and bless the sun and the moon
and the stars for the dear certainty of
it. And I ask you now, O heart that
has opened to me, have I once been
G
98 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
unhappy or impatient while this good
thing has been withheld from me? In-
deed my love for you has occupied me
too completely : I have been so glad to
find how much there is to learn in a
good heart deeply unconscious of its
own goodness. You have employed me
as I wish I may be employed all the
days of my life : and now my beloved
employer has given me the wages I did
not ask.
You love me! Is it a question of
little or much ? Is it not ratlier an
entire new thought of me that has
entered your life, as the thought of
you entered mine months that seem
years ago ? It was the seed then, and
seemed small; but the whole life was
there; and it has grown and grown till
now it is I who have become small, and
have hardly room in me for the roots :
and it seems to have gone so far up
over my head that I wonder if the
stars know of my happiness.
They must know of yours too, then,
my Beloved : they are no company for
me without you. Oh, to-day, to-day of
all days ! hoAv in my heart I shall go
LOVE-LETTERS 99
on kissing it till I die ! You love me :
that is wonderful ! You love me : and
already it is not wonderful in the least !
but belongs to Noah and the ark and
all the animals saved up for an earth
Avashed clean and dried, and the new
beginnings of time which have ever since
been twisting and turning with us in
safe keeping through all the history of
the world.
*We came over at the Norman con-
quest,' my dear, as people say trailing
their pedigree : but there was no an-
cestral pride about us — it was all for
the love of the thing we did it : how
clear it seems now ! In the hall hangs a
portrait in a big Avig, but otherwise the
image of my father, of a man who
flouted the authority of James ii. merely
because he was so like my father in
character that he could do nothing else.
I shall look for you now in the Bayeux
tapestries with a prong from your helmet
down the middle of your face — of which
that line on your forehead is the re-
mainder. And you love me ! I wonder
what the line has to do with that ?
By such little things do great things
100 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
seem to come about : not really. I
know it was not because I said just
what I did say, and did what I did
yesterday, that your heart was. bound
to come for mine. But it was those
small things that brought you conscious-
ness : and when we parted I knew that
I had all the world at my feet — or all
heaven over my head !
Ah, at last I may let the spirit or
a kiss go to you from me, and not be
ashamed or think myself forward since
I have your love. All this time you
are thinking of me: a certainty lying
far outside what I can see.
Beloved, if great happiness may be
set to any words, it is here ! If silence
goes better with it,— speak, silence, for
me when I end now !
Good-night, and think greatly of me !
I shall wake early.
Dearest, — Was my heart at all my own,
— was it my own to give, till you came
and made me aware of how much it
contains ? Truly, dear, it contained no-
LOVE-LETTERS 101
thing before, since now it contains you
and nothing else. So I have a brand-
new heart to give away : and you, you
want it and can't see that there it is
staring you in the face like a rose with
all its petals ready to drop.
I am quite sure that if I had not
met you, I could have loved nobody as
I love you. Yet it is very likely that
I should have loved— sufficiently, as the
way of the world goes. It is not a
romantic confession, but it is true to
life : I do so genuinely like most of my
fellow-creatures, and am not happy ex-
cept where shoulders rub socially : — that
is to say, have not until now been
happy, except dependently on the com-
pany and smiles of others. Xow, Be-
loved, I have none of your company,
and have had but few of your smiles
(I could count them all) ; yet I have
become more happy filling up my soli-
tude with the understanding of you
which has made me wise, than all the
rest of fate or fortune could make me.
Down comes autumn's sad heart and
finds me gay; and the asters, which
used to chill me at their appearing,
102 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
have come out like crocuses this year
because it is the beginning of a new
world.
And all the winter will carry more
than a suspicion of summer with it, just
as the longest days carry round light
from north-west to north-east, because
so near the horizon, but out of sight,
lies their sun. So you. Beloved, so
near to me now at last, though out of
sight.
M
Beloved, — Whether I have sorry or
glad things to think about, they are
accompanied and changed by thoughts
of you. You are my diary : — all goes
to you now. That you love me is the
very light by which I see everything.
Also I learn so much through having
you in my thoughts : I cannot say how
it is, for I have no more knowledge of
life than I had before : — yet I am wiser,
I believe, knowing much more what
lives at the root of things and what
men have meant and felt in all they
have done : — because I love you, dearest.
LOVE-LETTERS 103
Also I am quicker in my apprehensions,
and have more joy and more fear in
me than I had before. And if this
seems to be all about myself, it is all
about you really, Beloved !
Last week one of my dearest old
friends, our Rector, died : a character
you too would have loved. He was a
father to the whole village, rather stern
of speech, and no respecter of persons.
Yet he made a very generous allowance
for those who did not go through the
church door to find their salvation. I
often went only because I loved him ;
and he knew it.
I went for that reason alone last
Sunday. The whole village was full of
closed blinds : and of all things over
him Chopin's Funeral March was played !
— a thing utterly unchristian in its
meaning : wild pagan grief, desolate over
lost beauty. * Balder the beautiful is
dead, is dead ! ' it cried : and I thought
of you suddenly; you, who are not
Balder at all. Too many thorns have
been in your life, but not the mistle-
toe stroke dealt by a blind god ignor-
antly. Yet in all great joy there is
104 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
the Balder element : and I feared lest
something might slay it for me, and
my life become a cry like Chopin's
march over mown-down unripened grass,
and youth slain in its high places.
After service a sort of processional
mstinct drew people up to the house :
they waited about till permission was
given, and went in to look at their old
man, lying in high state among his
books. I did not go. Beloved, I have
never yet seen death : you have, I
know. Do you, I wonder, remember
your father better than I mine : — or
your brother ? Are they more living
because you saw them once not living ?
I think death might open our eyes to
those we lived on ill terms with, but
not to the familiar and dear. I do not
need you dead, to be certain that your
heart has mine for its true inmate and
mine yours.
I love you, I love you : so let good-
night bring you good-morning I
LOVE-LETTERS 105
N
At long intervals, dearest, I write to
you a secret all about yourself for my
eyes to see : because, chiefly because,
I have not you to look at. Thus I
bless myself with you.
Away over the world west of this and
a little bit north is the city of spires
where you are now. Never having
seen it I am the more free to picture
it as I like : and to me it is quite full
of you : — quite greedily full. Beloved,
when elsewhere you are so much wanted !
I send my thoughts there to pick up
crumbs for me.
It is a strange blend of notions —
wisdom and ignorance combhied : for
you I seem to know perfectly; but of
your life nothing at all. And yet no-
body there knows so much about you
as I. What you do matters so much
less than what you are. You, who are
the dearest heart in all the world, do
what you will, you are so still to me,
B^eloved.
I take a happy armful of thoughts
about you into all my dreams : and
106 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
when I wake they are there still, and
have done nothing but remain true.
What better can I ask of them ?
You do love me : you have not
changed ? Without change I remain
yours so long as I live.
O
And you, Beloved, what are you think-
inir of me all this while ? Think well of
me, I beg you : I deserve so much, loving
you as truly as I do !
So often, dearest, I sit thinking my
hands into yours again as when we were
saying good-bye the last time. Then it
was, under our laughter and light words,
that I saw suddenly how the thing too
great to name had become true, that
from friends we were changed into lovers.
It seemed the most natural thing to be,
and yet was wonderful — for it was I who
loved you first : a thing I could never be
ashamed of, and am now proud to own
— for has it not proved me wise ? My
love for you is the best wisdom that I
have. Good-night, dearest! Sleep as
well as I love you, and nobody in the
world will sleep so soundly.
LOVE-LETTERS 107
A FEW times in my life, Beloved, I have
had the Blue-moon-hunger for something
which seemed too impossible and good
ever to come true : prosaic people call it
being ' in the blues ' ; I comfort myself
with a prettier word for it. To-day, not
the Blue-moon itself, but the JNIan of
it came down and ate plum-porridge
with me ! Also, I do believe that it
burnt his mouth, and am quite reason-
ably happy thinking so, since it makes
me know that you love me as much as
ever.
If I have had doubts, dearest, they
have been of myself, lest I might be
unworthy of your friendship or love.
Suspicions of you I never had.
AVho wrote that suspicions among
thoughts are like bats among birds, flying
only by twilight ?
But even my doubts have been
thoughts. Beloved, — sure of you if not
always of myself. And if I have looked
for you only with doubtful vision, yet I
have always seen you in as strong a light
as my eyes could bear : — blue-moonlight.
108 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
Beloved, is not twilight : and blue-moon-
light has been the light I saw you by :
it is you alone who can make sunlight
of it.
This I read yesterday has lain on my
mind since as true and altogether beauti-
ful, with the beauty of major, not or
minor poetry, though it was a minor poet
who wrote it. It is of a wood where
Apollo has gone in quest of his Beloved,
and she is not yet to be found : —
' Here each branch
Swayed with a glitter all its crowded leaves,
And brushed the soft divine hair touching tliem
In ruffled clusters. .
Suddenly the moon
Smoothed herself out of vapour-drift and made
The deep night full of pleasure in the eye
Of her sweet motion. Not alone she came
Leading the starlight with her like a song :
And not a bud of all that undergrowth
But crisped and tingled out an ardent edge
As the light steeped it : over whose massed leaves
The portals of illimitable sleep
Faded in heaven.'
That is love in its moonrise, not its
sunrise stage : yet you see, Beloved, how
it takes possession of its dark world,
quite as fully as the brighter sunlight
LOVE-LETTERS 109
could do. And if I speak of doubts, I
mean no twilight and no suspicions : nor
by darkness do 1 mean any un happiness.
INIy blue-moon has come, leading the
starlight with her like a song. Am I
not happy enough to be patiently yours
before you know it? Good things which
are to be, before they happen are already
true. Nothing is so true as you are,
except my love for you and yours for me.
Good-night, good-night.
Sleep well. Beloved, and wake.
Q
Beloved, — I heard somebody yesterday
speak of you as ' charming ' ; and I be-
gan wondering to myself was that the
word which could ever have covered
my thoughts of you ? I do not know
whether you ever charmed me, except in
the sense of charming which means
magic and spell-binding. That you did
from the beginning, dearest. But I
think I held you at first in too mucli
awe to discover charm in you : and at
last knew you too much to the depths to
name you by a word so lightly used for
110 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
the surface of things. Yet now a charm
in you, which is not all you, but just a
part of you, comes to light, when I see
you wondering whether you are really
loved, or whether, Beloved, I only like
you rather well !
Well, if you will be so * charming,' I
am helpless : and can do nothing, nothing,
but pray for the blue-moon to rise, and
love you a little better because you
have some of that divine foolishness
which strikes the very wise ones of earth,
and makes them kin to weaker mortals
who otherwise might miss their * charm '
altogether.
Truly, Beloved, if I am happy, it is
because I am also your most patiently
loving.
R
Beloved, — The certainty which I have
now that you love me so fills all my
thoughts, I cannot understand you being
in any doubt on your side. What must
I do that I do not do, to show gladness
when we meet and sorrow when we have
to part? I am sure that I make no
LOVE-r.ETTERS 111
pretence or disguise, except that I do not
stand and wring my hands before all the
world, and cry ' Don't go ! ' — which has
sometimes been in my mind, to be kept
not said !
Indeed, T think so much of you, my
dear, that I believe some day, if you do
your part, you will only have to look up
from your books to find me standing. If
you did, would you still be in doubt
whether I loved you ?
Oh, if any apparition of me ever goes
to you, all my thoughts will surely look
truthfully out of its eyes ; and even you
will read what is there at last I
Beloved, I kiss your blind eyes, and
love them the better for all their un-
readiness to see that I am already their
slave. Not a day now but I think I
may see you again : I am in a golden
uncertainty from hour to hour.
I love you : you love me : a mist of
blessing swims over my eyes as I write
the words, till they become one and the
same thing : I can no longer divide their
meaning in my mind. Amen : there is
no need that I should.
112 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
Beloved, — I have not written to you for
quite a long time : ah, I could not. I
have nothing now to say ! I think I
could very easily die of this great happi-
ness, so certainly do you love me ! Just
a breath more of it and I should be gone.
Good-bye, dearest, and good-bye, and
good-bye ! If you want letters from me
now, you must ask for them ! That the
earth contains us both, and that we love
each other, is about all that I have mind
enough to take in. I do not think I can
love you more than I do : you are no
longer my dream but my great waking
thought. I am waiting for no blue-
moonrise now : my heart has not a wish
which you do not fulfil. I owe you my
whole life, and for any good to you must
pay it out to the last farthing, and still
feel myself your debtor.
Oh, Beloved, I am most poor and most
rich when I think of your love. Good-
night ; I can never let thought of you go 1
LOVE-LEITERS 113
Beloved, — These are almost all of them,
but not quite ; a few here and there have
cried to be taken out, saying they were
still too shy to be looked at. I can't
argue with them : they know their own
minds best ; and you know mine.
See what a dignified historic name 1
have given this letter-box, or chatter-
box, or whatever you like to call it.
But ' Hesurrection Pie ' is my name for
it. Don't eat too much of it, prays your
loving.
H
114 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER XXIII
Saving your presence, dearest, I would
rather have Prince Otto, a very lovable
character for second aiFections to cling
to. Richard Feverel would never marry
again, so I don't ask for him : as for the
rest, they are all too excellent for me.
They give me the impression of having
worn copy-books under their coats, when
they were boys, to cheat punishment:
and the copy-books got beaten into their
systems.
You must find me somebody who was
a 'gallons young hound' in the days of
his youth — Crossjay for instance : — there !
I have found the very man for me !
But really and truly, are you better?
It will not hurt your foot to come to
me, since I am not to come to you?
How I long to see you again, dearest ;
it is an age I As a matter of fact, it is
LOVE-LETTERS 115
a fortnight : but I dread lest you will
find some change in me. I have kept
a real white hair to show you, I drew
it out of my comb the other morning:
wound up into a curl it becomes quite
visible, and it is ivory-white : you are not
to think it flaxen, and take away its
one wee sentiment ! And I make you
an offer : — you shall have it if, honestly,
you can find in your own head a white
one to exchange.
Dearest, I am not hurt, nor do I take
seriously to heart your mother's present
coldness. How much more I could for-
give her when I put myself in her place !
She may well feel a struggle and some
resentment at having to give up in any
degree her place with you. All my
selfishness would come to the front if
that were demanded of me.
Do not think, because I leave her
alone, that I am repaying her coldness
in the same coin. I know that for the
present anything I do must offend.
Have I demanded your coming too
soon ? Then stay away another day —
or two : every day only piles up the
joy it will be to have your arms round
116 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
me once more. I can keep for a little
longer : and the grey hair will keep,
and many to-morrows will come bring-
ing good things for us, when perhaps
your mother's ' share of the world ' will
be over.
Don't say it, but when you next kiss
her, kiss her for me also : I am sorry for
all old people : their love of things they
are losing is so far more to be reverenced
and made room for than ours of the
things which will come to us in good
time abundantly.
To-night I feel selfish at having too
much of your love : and not a bit of it
can I let go ! I hope, Beloved, we shall
live to see each other's grey hairs in
earnest: grey hairs that we shall not
laugh at, as at this one I pulled. How
dark your dear eyes will look with a
white setting ! My heart's heart, every
day you grow larger round me, and I so
much stronger depending upon you !
I won't say — come for certain, to-
morrow: but come if, and as soon as, you
can. I seem to see a mile further when
I am on the look-out for you: and I
shall be long-sighted every day until
LOVE-LETTERS 117
you come. It is only doubtful hope de-
ferred which maketh the heart sick. I
am as happy as the day is long waiting
for you : but the day is long, dearest,
none the less when I don't see you.
All this space on the page below is
love. I have no time left to put it into
words, or words into it. You bless my
thoughts constantly. — Believe me, never
your thoughtless.
118 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER XXIV
Dearest, — How, when, and where is
there any use wrangling as to which of
us loves the other the best (' the better,'
I believe, would be the more grammatical
phrase in incompetent Queen's English),
and why in that of all things should we
pretend to be rivals ? For this at least
seems certain to me, that, being created
male and female, no two lovers since the
world began ever loved each other quite
in the savie way : it is not in nature for it
to be so. They cannot compare : only to
the best that is in them they do love each
after their kind, — as do we for certain !
Be sure, then, that I am utterly con-
tented with what I get (and you. Beloved,
and you ?) : nay, I wonder for ever at the
love you have given me : and if I will to
lay mine at your feet, and feel yours
crowning my life, — why, so it is, you
LOVE-LETTERS 119
know ; you cannot alter it I And if
you insist that your love is at my feet,
I have only to turn Irish and reply that
it is because I am heels over head in
love with you : — and, mark you, that is
no pretty attitude for a lady that you
have driven me into in order that I may
stick to my * crown ' !
Go to, dearest ! There is one thing in
which I can beat you, and that is in the
bandying of words and all verbal conjur-
ings : take this as the last proof of it and
rest quiet. I know you love me a great
great deal more than I have wit or power
to love you : and that is just the little
reason why your love mounts till, as I
tell you, it crowns me (head or heels) :
while mine, insufficient and grovelling,
lies at your feet, and will till they
become amputated. And I can give
you, but won't, sixty other reasons why
things are as I say, and are to be left as
I say. And oh, my world, my world, it
is with you I go round sunwards, and
you make my evenings and mornings,
and will, till Time shuts his wings over
us ! And now it is doleful business I
have to write to vou. . . .
120 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
I have dropped to sleep over all this
writing of things, and my cheek down on
the page has made the paper unwilling
to take the ink again : — what a pretty-
compliment to me : and, if you prefer it,
what an easy way of writing to you ! I
can send you such any day and be as idle
as I like. And you will decide about all
the above exactly as you and I think
best (or should it be ' better' again, being
only between us two ?). When you get
this, blow your beloved self a kiss in the
glass for me, — a great big shattering blow
that shall astonish ]Mercury behind his
window-pane. Good-night, my best —
or * better,' for that is what I most want
you to be.
LOVE-LETTERS 121
LETTER XXV
My own Beloved, — And I never
thanked you yesterday for your dear
words about the resurrection pie ; that
comes of quarrelHng ! Well, you must
prove them and come quickly that I
may see this restoration of health and
spirits that you assure me of. You avoid
saying that they sent you to sleep ; but
I suppose that is what you mean.
Fate meant me only to light upon gay
things this morning : listen to this and
guess where it comes from: —
When March with variant winds was past,
And April had with her silver showers
Ta'en leif at life with an orient blast;
And lusty May, that mother of flowers.
Had made tlie birds to begin their hours,
Among the odours ruddy and white.
Whose harmony was the ear's delight :
122 AN ENGIJSH WOMAN'S
In bed at morrow I sleeping lay ;
Methought Aurora, with crystal een,
In at the window looked by day,
And gave me her visage pale and green :
And on her hand sang a lark from the splene,
" Awake ye lovers from slumbering !
See how the lusty morrow doth spring ! " '
Ah, but you are no scholar of the things
in your own tongue ! That is Dunbar,
a Scots poet contemporary of Henry vii.,
just a Httle bit altered by me to make
him soundable to your ears. If I had
not had to leave an archaic word here and
there, would you ever have guessed he
lay outside this century ? That shows
the permanent element in all good
poetry, and in all good joy in things
also. In the four centuries since that
was written we have only succeeded in
worsening the meaning of certain words,
as for instance ' spleen,' which now means
irritation and vexation, but stood then
for quite the opposite — what we should
call, I suppose, 'a full heart.' It is
what I am always saying — a good
digestion is the root of nearly all the
good living and high thinking we are
capable of: and the spleen was then the
LOVE-LETTERS 123
root of the happy emotions as it is now
of the miserable ones. Your pre-Refor-
mation lark sang from ' a full stomach,'
and thanked God it had a constitution
to carry it off without affectation : and
your nineteenth century lark applying
the same code of life, his plain-song is
mere happy everyday prose, and not
poetry at all as we try to make it
out to be.
I have no news for you at all of any
one : all inside the house is a simmer of
peace and quiet, with blinds drawn down
ao-aiust the heat the whole dav lons^. No
callers ; and as for me, I never call else-
where. The gossips about here eke out
a precarious existence by washing each
other's dirty linen in public : and the
process never seems to result in any
satisfactory cleansing.
I avoid saying what news I trust to-
morrow's post-bag may contain for me.
Every wish I send you comes 'from the
spleen,' which means I am very healthy,
and, conditionally, as happy as is good
for me. Pray God bless my dear Share
of the world, and make him get well for
his own and my sake I Amen.
124 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
This catches the noon post, an event
which always shows I am jubilant, with
a lot of the opposite to a ' little death '
feeling running over my nerves. I feel
the 2f:rass growing? under me : the reverse
of poor Keats 's complaint. Good-bye,
Beloved, till I find my way into the
provender of to-morrow's post-bag.
LOVE-LETTERS 125
LETTER XXVI
Oh, wings of the morning, here you
come ! I have been looking out for you
ever since post came. Roberts is carry-
ing orders into town, and will bring
you this with a touch of the hat and
an amused grin under it. I saw you
right on the top Sallis Hill : this is to
wager that my eyes have told me cor-
rectly. Look out for me from far away,
I am at my corner window : wave to
me ! Dearest, this is to kiss you before
I can.
126 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER XXVII
Dearest, — I have made a bad beginning
of the week : I wonder how it will end ?
it all comes of my not seeing enough of
you. Time hangs heavy on my hands,
and the Devil finds me the mischief !
I prevailed upon myself to go on
Sunday and listen to our new lately
appointed vicar : for I thought it not
fair to condemn him on the strength of
]\Irs. P 's terrible reporting powers
and her sensuous worship of his full-blown
flowers of speech — ' pulpit-pot-plants ' is
what I call them.
It was all not worse and not other-
wise than I had expected. I find there
are only two kinds of clerics as generally
necessary to salvation in a country parish
— one leads his parishioners to the altar
and the other to the pulpit : and the
latter is vastly the more popular among
LOVE-LETTERS 127
the articulate and gad-about members
of his flock. This one sways himself
over the edge of his frame, making
sio-nals of distress in all directions, and
with that and his windy flights of oratory
suggests twenty minutes in a balloon-
car, till he comes down to earth at the
finish with the Doxology for a parachute.
His shepherd's crook is one long note
of interrogation, with which he tries to
hook down the heavens to the under-
standing of his hearers, and his hearers
up to an understanding of himself. All
his arguments are put interrogatively,
and few of them are worth answering.
Well, well, I shall be all the freer for
your visit when you come next Sunday,
and any Sunday after that you will :
and he shall come in to tea if you like
and talk to you in quite a cultured and
agreeable manner, as he can when his
favourite beverage is before him.
I discover that I get 'the snaps on
a Monday morning, if I get them at all.
The M.A. gets them on the Sunday
itself, softly but regularly : they distress
no one, and we all know the cause : her
fingers are itching for the knitting which
128 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
she mayn't do. Your protestant ignores
Lent as a popish device, a fond thing
vainly invented : but spreads it instead
over fifty-two days in the year. Why,
I want to know, cannot I change the
subject ?
Sunday we get no post (and no collec-
tion except in church) unless we send
down to the town for it, so Monday is all
the more welcome : but this I have been
up and writing before it arrives — there-
fore the ' snaps.'
Our postman is a lovely sight. I
watched him walking up the drive the
other morning, and he seemed quite per-
fection, for I guessed he was bringing me
the thing which would make me happy
all day. I only hope the Government
pays him properly.
I think this is the least pleasant letter
I have ever sent you : shall I tell you
why ? It was not the sermon : he is
quite a forgivable good man in his way.
But in the afternoon that same Mrs.
P came, got me in a corner and
wanted to unburden herself of invective
against your mother, believing that I
should be glad, because her coldness to
LOVE-LETTERS 129
me has become known ! What mean
things some people can think about one !
I heard nothing : but I am ruffled in all
my plumage and want stroking. And
my love to your mother, please, if she
will have it. It is only through her that
I get you. — Ever your very own.
130 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER XXVIII
Dearest, — Here comes a letter to you
from me flying in the opposite direction.
I won't say I am not wishing to go ; but
oh, to be a bird in two places at once I
Give this letter, then, a special nesting-
place, because I am so much on the
wing elsewhere.
I shut my eyes most of the time
through France, and opened them on a
soup-tureen full of coffee which pre-
sented itself at the frontier: and then
realised that only a little way ahead lay
Berne, with baths, buns, bears, breakfast,
and other nice things beginning with B,
waiting to make us clean, comfortable,
contented, and other nice things begin-
ning with C.
Through France I loved you sleepy
fashion, with many dreams in between not
all about you. But now I am breathing
LOVE-LETTERS 131
thoughts of you out of a new atmo-
sphere— a great gulp of you, all clean-
living and high-thinking between these
Alpine royal highnesses with snow-white
crowns to their heads : and no time for a
word more about anything except you :
you, and double-you, — and treble-you if
the alphabet only had grace to contain
so beautiful a symbol ! Good-bye : we
meet next, perhaps, out of Lucerne : if
not, — Italy.
What a lot I have to go through before
we meet again visibly ! You will find
me world-worn, my Beloved ! Write
often.
132 AN ENGLISHWO.AIAN'S
LETTER XXIX
Beloved, — You know of the method for
making a cat settle down in a strange
place by buttering her all over : the
theory being that by tiie time she has
polished off the butter she feels herself
at home ? My morning's work has been
the buttering of the Mother-Aunt with
such things as will Lucerne her the
most. When her instincts are appeased
I am the more free to indulge my own.
So after breakfast we went round the
cloisters, very thick set with tablets and
family vaults, and crowded graves en-
closed. It proved quite ' the best butter.'
To me the penance turned out interest-
ing after a period of natural repulsion.
A most unpleasant addition to sepulchral
sentiment is here the fashion : photo-
graphs of the departed set into the
stone. You see an elegant and genteel
LOVE-LETTERS 183
marble cross : there on the pedestal
above the name is the photo : — a smug
man with bourgeois whiskers, — a militia-
man with waxed moustaches well turned
up, — a woman well attired and conscious
of it: you cannot think how indecent
looked the pretension of such types to
the dignity of death and immortality.
But just one or two faces stood the
test, and were justified : a young man
oppressed with the burden of youth ; a
sweet, toothless grandmother in a bonnet,
wearing old age like a flower ; a woman
not beautiful but for her neck which
carried indignation ; her face had a
thwarted look. ' Dead and rotten ' one
did not say of these in disgust and in-
voluntarily as one did of the others.
And yet I don't suppose the eye picks
out the faces that kindled most kindness
round them when living, or that one can
see well at all where one sees without
sympathy. I think the Mother- Aunt's
face would not look dear to most people
as it does to me, — yet my sight of her is
the truer : only 1 would not put it up on
a tombstone in order that it mio-ht look
nothing to those that pass by.
134 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
I wrote this much, and then, leaving
.the M.A. to glory in her innumerable
correspondence, Arthur and I went off
to the lake, where we have been for
about seven hours. On it, I found it
become infinitely more beautiful, for
everything was mystified by a lovely
bloomy haze, out of which the white
peaks floated like dreams : and the
mountains change and change, and seem
not all the same as going when returning.
Don't ask me to write landscape to you :
one breathes it in, and it is there ever
after, but remains unset to words.
The T s whittle themselves out of
our company just to the right amount :
come back at the right time (which is
more than Arthur and I are likely to do
when our legs get on the spin), and are
duly welcome with a diversity of doings
to talk about. Their tastes are more the
M.A.'s, and their activities about half-
way between hers and ours, so we make
rather a fortunate quintette. The M
trio join us the day after to-morrow,
when the majority of us will head away
at once to Florence. Ai-thur growls and
threatens he means to be left behind for
LOVE-LETTERS 135
a week : and it suits the funny little
jealousy of the M.A. well enough to
see us parted for a time, quite apart
from the fact that I shall then be more
dependent on her company. She will
then glory in overworking herself, — say
it is me; and I shall feel a fiend. No
letter at all, dearest, this ; merely talky-
talky. — Yours without words.
136 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER XXX
Dearest, — I cannot say I have seen
Pisa, for the majority had their way, and
we simply skipped into it, got ourselves
bumped down at the Duomo and Campo
Santo for two hours, fell exhausted to bed,
and skipped out again by the first train
next morning. Over the walls of the
Campo Santo are some divine crumbs of
Benozzo Gozzoli (don't expect me ever
to spell the names of dead painters
correctly : it is a politeness one owes to
the living, but the famous dead are
exalted by being spelt phonetically as
the heart dictates, and become all the
better company for that greatest of
unspelt and spread-about names — Shak-
spere, Shakspeare, Shakespeare — his mark,
not himself). Such a long parenthesis
requires stepping-stones to carry you
over it : ' crumbs ' was the last (wasn't a
•iw
LOVE-LETTERS 137
whole loaf of bread a stepping-stone in
one of Andersen's fairy-tales ?) : but,
indeed, I hadn't time to digest them
properly. Let me come back to them
before I die, and bury me in that en-
closure if you love me as much then as I
think you do now.
The Baptistry has a roof of echoes that
is wonderful, — a mirror of sound hung
over the head of an official who opens his
mouth for centimes to drop there. You
sing notes up into it (or rather you don't,
for that is his perquisite), and they fly
circling, and flock, and become a single
chord stretching two octaves : till you
feel that you are living inside what in the
days of our youth would have been called
'the sound of a grand Amen.'
The cathedral has fine points, or more
than points — aspects : but the Italian
version of Gothic, with its bands of flat
marbles instead of mouldings, was a shock
to me at first. I only begin to under-
stand it now that I have seen the outside
of the Duomo at Florence. Curiously
enough, it doesn't strike me as in the
least Christian, only civic and splendid,
reminding me of what Ruskin says about
138 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
church architecture being really a de-
pendant on the feudal or domestic. The
Strozzi Palace is a beautiful piece of
street-architecture ; its effect is of an
iron hand which gives you a buffet in the
face when you look up and wonder —
how shall I climb in ? I will tell you
more about insides when I write next.
I fear my last letter to you from
Lucerne may either have strayed, or not
even have begun straying : for in the
hurry of coming away 1 left it, addressed,
I think, but unstamped ; and I am not sure
that that particular hotel will be Christian
enough to spare the postage out of the
bill, which had a galaxy of small extras
running into centimes, and suggesting a
red-tape rectitude that would not show
blind 25-centime gratitude to the backs
of departed guests. So be patient and
forgiving if I seem to have written little.
I found two of yours waiting for me, and
cannot choose between them which I
find most dear. I will say, for a fancy,
the shorter, that you may ever be en-
couraged to write your shortest rather
than none at all. One word from you
gives me almost as much pleasure as
LOVE-LETTERS 189
twenty, for it contains all your sincerity
and truth ; and what more do I want ?
You bless me quite. How many per-
fectly happy days I owe to you, and
seldom dare dream that I have made any
beginning of a return ! If I could take
one unhappy day out of your life, dearest,
the secret would be mine, and no such
thing should be left in it. Be happy,
beloved ! oh, happy, happy, — with me for
a partial reason — that is what I wish 1
UO AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER XXXI
Dearest, — The Italian paper-money
paralyses my brain : I cannot calculate
in it; and were I left to myself an un-
scrupulous shopman could empty me of
pounds without my becoming conscious
of it till I beheld vacuum. But the T s
have been wonderful caretakers to me :
and to-morrow Arthur rejoins us, so that
I shall be able to resume my full activities
under his safe-conduct.
The ways of the Italian cabbies and
porters fill me with terror for the time
when I may have to fall alive and un-
assisted into their hands : they have
neither conscience nor gratitude, and
regard thievish demands when satisfied
merely as stepping-stones to higher things.
Many of the outsides of Florence I
seemed to know by heart — the Palazzo
Vecchio for instance. But close by it
LOVE-LETTERS 141
Cellini's two statues, the Judith and the
Perseus, brought my heart up to my
mouth unexpectedly. The Perseus is so
out of proportion as to be ludicrous from
one point of view : but another is mag-
nificent enough to make me forgive the
scamp his autobiography from now to the
day of judgment (when we shall all begin
forgiving each other in great haste, I
suppose, for fear of the devil taking the
hindmost !), and I registered a vow on
the spot to that effect : — so no more of
him here, henceforth, but good !
There is not so much colour about as
I had expected : and austerity rather
than richness is the note of most of the
exteriors.
I have not been allowed into the
Uffizi yet, so to-day consoled myself with
the Pitti. Titian's ' Duke of Norfolk ' is
there, and I loved him, seeing a certain
likeness there to somebody whom I —
like. A photo of him will be coming to
you. Also there is a very fine Lely-
Vandj^ck of Charles i. and Henrietta
INI aria, a quite moral painting, making a
triumphant assertion of that martyr's bad
character. I imagine he got into Heaven
142 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
through having his head cut off and cast
from him : otherwise all of him would
have perished along with his mouth.
Somewhere too high up was hanging
a ravishing Botticelli — a Madonna and
Child bending over like a wind-blown tree
to be kissed by St. John : — a composition
that takes you up in its arms and rocks
you as you look at it. Andrea del Sarto
is to me only a big mediocrity : there is
nothing here to touch his chortling child-
Christ in our National Gallery.
At Pisa I slept in a mosquito-net, and
felt like a bride at the altar under a tulle
veil which was too large for her. Here,
for lack of that luxury, being assured
that there were no mosquitoes to be had,
I have been sadly ravaged. The creatures
pick out all foreigners, I think, and only
when they have exhausted the supply do
they pass on to the natives. Mrs. T
left one foot unveiled when in Pisa, and
only this morning did the irritation in
the part bitten begin to come out.
I can now ask for a bath in Italian,
and order the necessary things for myself
in the hotel : also say ' come in ' and
'thank you.' But just the few days of
LOVE-LETTERS 143
that very German table dhote at Lucerne,
where I talked gladly to polish myself
up, have given my tongue a hybrid way
of talking without thinking : and I say
*ja,jay and ' nein,' and ' der, die, das," as
often as not before such Italian nouns as
I have yet captured. To fall upon a
chambermaid who knows French is like
coming upon my native tongue suddenly.
Give me good news of your foot and
all that is above it : I am so doubtful of
its being really strong yet ; and its willing
spirits will overcome it some day and do
it an injury, and hurt my feelings dread-
fully at the same time.
Walk only on one leg whenever you
think of me ! I tell you truly I am
wonderfully little lonely : and yet my
thoughts are constantly away with you,
wishing, wishing, — what no word on paper
can ever carry to you. It shall be at our
next meeting ! — All yours.
144 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER XXXII
My Dearest, — Florence is still eating
up all my time and energies : I promised
you there should be austerity and seli-
denial in the matter of letter- writing :
and I know you are unselfish enough to
expect even less than I send you.
Girls in the street address compliments
to Arthur's complexion : — * beautiful
orown boy ' they call him : and he
simmers over with vanity, and wishes
he could show them his boating arms,
brown up to the shoulder, as well.
Have you noticed that combination in
some of the dearest specimens of young
English manhood, — great physical vanity
and great mental modesty ? and each as
transparently sincere as the other.
The Bargello is an ideal museum for
the storage of the best things out of the
IMiddle Ages. It opens out of splendid
LOVE-LETTERS 145
courtyards and staircases, and ranges
through rooms which have quite a feudal
gloom about them ; most of these are
hung with bad late tapestries (too late
at least for my taste), so that the gloom
is welcome and charming, making even
* Gobelins ' quite bearable. I find quite
a new man here to admire — Pollaiolo,
both painter and sculptor, one of the
school of ' passionate anatomists,' as 1
call them, about the time of Botticelli,
I fancy. He has one bust of a young
Florentine which equals Verocchio on
the same ground, and charms me even
more. Some of his subjects are done
twice over, in paint and bronze : but he
is more really a sculptor, I think, and
tnerely paints his piece into a picture
from its best point of view.
Verocchio's idea of David is charming:
he is a saucy fellow who has gone in for
it for the fun of the thing — knew he
could bring down a hawk with his cata-
pult, and therefore why not a Goliath
also ? If he failed, he need but cut and
run, and everybody would laugh and call
him plucky for doing even that much.
So he does it, brings down his big game
K
146 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
by good luck, and stands posing with a
sort of irresistible stateliness to suit the
result. He has a laugh something like
' little Dick's,' only more full of bubbles,
and is saying to himself, * What a hero
they all think me ! ' He is the merriest
of sly-dog hypocrites, and has thin, wiry
arms and a craney neck. He is a bit like
Tom Sawyer in character, more ornate
and dramatic than Huckleberry Finn,
but quite as much a liar, given a good
cause.
Another thing that has seized me,
more for its idea than actual carrying
out, is an unnamed terra-cotta Madonna
and Child. He is crushing himself up
against her neck, open-mouthed and
terrified, and she spreading long fingers
all over his head and face. My notion
of it is that it is the Godhead taking his
first look at life from the human point of
view ; and he realises himself ' caught
in his own trap,' discovering it to be
ever so much worse than it had seemed
from an outside view. It is a fine
modern zeit-geist piece of declamation
to come out of the rather over-sweet
della Robbia period of art.
LOVE-LETTERS 147
There seems to have been a rage at
one period for commissioning statues of
David : so Donatello and others just
turned to and did what they liked most
in the way of budding youth, stuck a
Goliath's head at its feet, and called it
* David.' Verocchio is the exception.
We are going to get outside Florence
for a week or ten days ; it is too hot to
be borne at night after a day of tiring
activity. So we go to the D s' villa,
which they offered us in their absence;
it lies about four miles out, and is on
much higher ground : address only your
very immediately next letter there, or it
may miss me.
There are hills out there with vine-
yards among them which draw me into
wishing to be away from towns alto-
gether. IMuch as I love what is to be
found in this one, I think Heaven meant
me to be ' truly rural ' ; which all falls
in, dearest, with what / mean to be !
Beloved, how little I sometimes can say
to you ! Sometimes my heart can put
only silence into the end of a letter ; and
with that I let this one go. — Yours, and
so lovingly.
148 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER XXXIII
Beloved, — I had your last letter on
Friday : all your letters have come in
their right numbers. I have lost count
of mine; but I think seven and two
postcards is the total, wliich is the same
as the numbers of clean and unclean
beasts proportionately represented in the
ark.
Up here we are out of the deadliness
of the heat, and are thankful for it.
Vineyards and olives brush the eyes
between the hard, upright bars of the
cypresses: and Florence below is like a
hot bath which we dip into and come
out again. At the Riccardi chapel I
found Benozzo Gozzoli, not in crumbs,
but perfectly preserved: a procession of
early Florentine youths, turning into
angels when they get to the bay of the
window where the altar once stood. The
LOVE-LETTERS 149
more I see of them, the greater these
early men seem to me : I shall be afraid
to go to Venice soon ; Titian will only-
half satisfy me, and Tintoretto, 1 know,
will be actively annoying : I shall stay in
my gondola, as your American lady did
on her donkey after riding twenty miles
to visit the ruins of — Carnac, was it not ?
It is well to have the courage of one's
likings and dislikings, that is the only
true culture (the state obtained by use
of a ' coulter ' or cutter) — I cut many
things severely which, no doubt, are good
for other people.
Botticelli I was shy of, because of the
craze about him among people who know
nothing: he is far more wonderful than
I had hoped, both at the LTffizi and the
Academia: but he is quite pagan. I
don't know why I say ' but ' ; he is
quite typical of the world's art-training :
Christianity may get hold of the names
and dictate the subjects, but the artist-
breed carries a fairly level head through
it all, and, like Pater's INIona Lisa, draws
Christianity and Paganism into one : at
least, wherever it reaches perfect ex-
pression it has done so. Some of the
150 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
distinctly primitives are different; their
works enclose a charm which is not
artistic. Fra Angelico, after being a
great disappointment to me in some of
his large set pictures in the Academia
and elsewhere, shows himself lovely in
fresco (though I think the ' crumb ' ele-
ment helps him). His great Crucifixion
is big altogether, and has so permanent
a force in its aloofness from mere drama
and mere life. In San Marco, the cells
of the monks are quite charming, a row
of little square bandboxes under a broad
raftered corridor, and in every cell is a
beautiful little fresco for the monks to
live up to. But they no longer live
there now : all that part of San Marco
has become a peep-show.
I liked being in Savonarola's room,
and was more susceptible to the remains
of his presence than I have been to
Michel Angelo or any one else's. JNIichel
Angelo I feel most when he has left a
thing unfinished ; then one can put one's
finger into the print of the chisel, and
believe anything of the beauty that
might have come out of the great stone
chrysalis lying cased and rough, waiting
to be raised up to life.
LOVE-LETTERS 151
Yesterday Arthur and I walked from
here to Fiesole, which we had neglected
while in Florence— six miles going, and
more like twelve coming back, all because
of Arthurs absurd cross-country instinct,
which, after hours of river-bends, bare
mountain tracks, and tottering preci-
pices, brought us out again half a mile
nearer Florence than when we started.
At Fiesole is the only church about
here whose interior architecture I have
greatly admired, austere but at the same
time gracious — like a ^Madonna of the
best period of painting. We also went
to look at the Roman baths and theatre:
the theatre is charming enough, because
it is still there : but for the baths —
oblongs of stone don't interest me just
because they are old. All stone is old :
and these didn't even hold water to give
one the real look of the thing. Too
tired, and even more too lazy, to write
other things, except love, most dear
Beloved.
152 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER XXXIV
Dearest, — We were to have gone down
with the rest into Florence yesterday :
but soft miles of Italy gleamed too
invitingly away on our right, and I saw
Arthur's eyes hungry with the same
far-away wish. So I said ' Prato,' and
he ran up to the fattore's and secured
a wondrous shandry-dan with just space
enough between its horns to toss the
two of us in the direction where we
would go. Its gaunt framework was
painted of a bright red, and our feet had
only netting to rest on : so constructed,
the creature was most vital and light
of limb, taking every rut on the road
with flea-like agility. Oh, but it was
worth it I
We had a drive of fourteen miles
through hills and villages, and castel-
lated villas with gardens shut in by
LOVE-LETTERS 153
formidably high walls — always a charm :
a garden should always have something
of the jealous seclusion of a harem. I
am getting Italian landscape into my
system, and enjoy it more and more.
Prato is a little cathedral town, very
like the narrow and tumble-down parts
of Florence, only more so. The streets
were a seething caldron of cattle- market
Avhen we entered, which made us feel
like a tea-cup in a bull-ring (or is it
thunderstorm ? ) as we drove through
needle 's-eye ways bristling with agitated
horns.
The cathedral is little and good :
damaged, of course, wherever the last
three centuries have laid hands on it.
At the corner of the west front is an
out-door pulpit beautifully put on with
a mushroom hood over its head. The
main lines of the interior are finely
severe, either quite round or quite flat,
and proportions good always. An up-
holstered priest coming out to say mass
is generally a sickening sight, so wicked
and ugly in look and costume. The best-
behaved people are the low-down beggars,
who are most decoratively devotional.
154 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
We tried to model our exit on ii
brigand-beggar who came in to ask per-
mission to murder one of his enemies.
He got his request granted at one of the
side-altars (some strictly local Madonna,
I imagine), and his gratitude as he de-
parted was quite touching. Having
studiously copied his exit, we want to
know whom we shall murder to pay
ourselves for our trouble.
It amuses me to have my share of
driving over these free and easy and very
narrow highroads. But A. has to do the
collision-shouting and the cries of ' Via ! '
— the horse only smiles when he hears
me do it.
Also did I tell you that on Saturday
we two walked from here over to Fie-
sole — six miles there, and ten back : for
why ? — because we chose to go what
Arthur calls *a bee-line across country,'
having thought we had sighted a route
from the top of Fiesole. But in the
valley we lost it, and after breaking our
necks over precipices and our hearts down
cul-de-sacs that led nowhere, and losing
all the ways that were pointed out to us,
for lack of a knowledge of the language.
LOVE-LETTERS 155
we came out aoain into view of Florence
about half a mile nearer than when we
started and proportionately far away from
home. When he had got me thoroughly
foot-sore, Arthur remarked complacently,
* The right way to see a country is to lose
yourself in it I ' I didn't feel the truth of
it then : but applied to other things I
perceive its wisdom. Dear heart, where
I have lost myself, what in all the world
do I know so well as you ?
Your most lost and loving.
156 AN ENGLISHWOMANS
LETTER XXXV
Beloved, — Rain swooped down on us
from on high during the night, and the
country is cut into islands : the river
from a rocky wriggling stream has risen
into a tawny, opaque torrent that roars
with a voice a mile long and is become
quite unfordable. The little mill-stream
just below has broken its banks and
poured itself away over the lower vine-
yards into the river ; a lot of the vines
look sadly upset, generally unhinged and
unstrung, yet I am told the damage is
really small. I hope so, for I enjoyed a
real lash-out of weather, after the change-
lessness of the long heat.
I have been down in Florence begin-
ning to make my farewells to the many
thinffs I have seen too little of. We
start away for Venice about the end of
the week. At the Uffizi I seem to have
LOVE-LETTERS 157
found out all my future favourites the
first day, and very little new has come
to me ; but most of them go on grow-
ing. The Raphael lady is quite wonder-
ful; I think she was in love with him,
and her soul went into the painting
though he himself did not care for her ;
and she looks at you and says, ' See a
miracle : he was able to paint this, and
never knew that I loved him ! ' It is
wonderful that ; but I suppose it can
be done, — a soul pass into a work and
haunt it without its creator knowing
anything about how it came there.
Always when I come across anything
like that which has something inner and
rather mysterious, I tremble and want to
get back to you. You are the touch-
stone by which I must test everything
that is a little new and unfamiliar.
From now onwards, dearest, you must
expect only cards for a time : it is not
settled yet whether we stop at Padua
on our way in or our way out. I am
clamouring for Verona also ; but that
will be off our route, so Arthur and I
may go there alone for a couple of greedy
days, which I fear will onlv leave me
158 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
dissatisfied and wishing I had had patience
to depend on coming again — perhaps with
you !
Uncle N. has written of your numerous
visits to him, and I understand you have
been very good in his direction. He does
not speak of loneliness ; and with Anna
and her brood next week or now, he will
be as happy as his temperament allows
him to be when he has nothing to worry
over.
I am proud to say I have gone brown
without freckles. And are you really as
cheerful as you write yourself to be?
Dearest and best, when is your holiday
to begin ; and is it to be with me ? Does
anywhere on earth hold that happiness
for us both in the near future ? I kiss
you well. Beloved.
LOVE-LETTERS 159
LETTER XXXVI
Dearest, — Venice is round me as I
write ! Well, I will not waste my
Baedeker knowledge on you, — you too
can get a copy ; and it is not the pano-
ramic view of things you will be wanting
from me : it is my own particular Venice
I am to find out and send vou. So first
of all from the heart of it I send you
mine : when I have kissed you I will go
on. My eyes have been seeing so much
that is new, I shall want a fresh vocabu-
lary for it all. But mainly I want to say,
let us be here again together quickly,
before we lose any more of our youth or
our two-handed hold on life. I get short
of breath thinking of it !
So let it be here. Beloved, that some
of our soon-to-be happiness opens and
shuts its eyes : for truly Venice is a sleepy
160 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
place. I am wanting, and taking, nine
hours' sleep after all I do I
Outside coming over the flats from
Padua, she looked something like a
manufacturing town at its ablutions, —
a smoky chimney well to the fore : but
get near to her and you find her standing
on turquoise, her feet set about with
jaspers, and with one of her eyes she
ravishes you : and all her campanile are
like the ' thin flames ' of ' souls mounting
up to God.'
That is from without ; within she be-
comes too sensuous and civic in her
splendour to let me think much of souls.
'Rest and be indolent' is the motto for
the life she teaches. The architecture is
the song of the lotos-eater built into
stone — were I in a more florid mood I
would have said * swan-song,' for the
whole stands finished with nothing more
to be added : it has sung itself out : and
if there is a moral to it all, no doubt it is
in Ruskin, and I don't want to read it
just now.
What I want is you close at hand
looking up at all this beauty, and smiling
when I smile, which is your way, as if
LOVE-LEITERS 161
you had no opinions of your ovm about
anything in which you are not a pro-
fessor. So you will write and agree that
I am to have the pleasure of this return
to look forward to ? If I know that, I
shall be so much more reconciled to all
the joy of the things I am seeing now
for the first time : and shall see so much
better the second, Beloved, when your
eyes are here helping me.
Here is love, dearest ! help yourself to
just as much as you wish for ; though all
that I send is good for you 1 No letter
from you since Florence, but I am neither
sad nor anxious : only all the more your
loving.
162 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER XXXVII
Beloved, — The weather is as grey as
England to-day, and much rainier. To
feel it on my cheeks and be back north
with that and warmer things, I would
go out in it in the face of protests, and
had to go alone — not Arthur even being
in the mood just then for a patriotic
quest of the uncomfortable. I had my-
self oared into the lagoons across a
racing current and a driving head-wind
which made my gondolier bend like a
distressed poplar over his oar ; patience
on a monument smiling at backsheesh —
' all comes to him who knows.'
Of course, for comfort and pleasure,
and everything but economy, we have
picked up a gondolier to pet : we making
much of him, and he much out of us.
He takes Arthur to a place where he
can bathe — to use his own expression —
LOVE-LETTERS 163
* cleanly,' that is to say, unconventionally;
and this appropriately enough is on the
borders of a land called ' the Garden of
Eden ' (being named so after its owners).
He — ' Charon ' I call him — is large and
of ruddy countenance, and talks English
in blinkers — that is to say, gondola
English — out of which he could not
find words to summon me a cab even
if it were not opposed to his interests.
Still there are no cabs to be called in
Venice, and he is teaching us that the
shortest way is always by water. If
Arthur is not punctually in his gondola
by 7 A.M., I hear a callfor the 'Signore
Inglese ' go up to his window ; and it is
hungry Charon waiting to ferry him.
Yesterday your friend ^Ir. C called
and took me over to Murano in a beau-
tiful pair-oared boat that simply flew.
There I saw a wonderful apse filled with
mosaic of dull gold, wherein is set a blue-
black figure of the Madonna, ten heads
high and ten centuries old, which almost
made me become a INIariolatrist on the
spot. She stands leaning up the bend
with two pale hands lifted in ghostly
blessing. Underfoot the floor is all
164 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
mosaic, mountainous with age and earth-
quakes ; the architecture classic in the
grip of Byzantine Christianity, which is
hke the spirit of God moving on the face
of the waters, or Ezekiel prophesying to
the dry bones.
The CoUeoni is quite as much more
beautiful in fact and seen full-size as I
had hoped from all smaller reproductions.
A fine equestrian figure always strikes
one as enthroned, and not merely riding ;
if I can't get that, I consider a centaur
the nobler creature with its human body
set down into the socket of the brute,
and all fire — -a candle burning at both
ends : which, in a way, is what the centaur
means, I imagine ?
Bellini goes on being wonderful, and for
me beats Raphael's Blenheim INIadonna
period on its own ground. I hear now
that the Raphael lady I raved over in
Florence is no Raphael at all, — which
accounts for it being so beautiful and
interesting — to me, I hasten to add.
Raphael's studied calmness, his soul of
' invisible soap and imperceptible water,'
may charm some; me it only chills or
leaves unmoved.
LOVE-LETTERS 165
Is this more about art than you care
to hear ? I have nothing to say about
myself, except that I am as happy as a
cut-in-half thing can be. Is it any use
sending kind messages to your mother?
If so, my heart is full of them. Bless
you, dearest, and good-night.
166 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER XXXVIII
Dearest, — St. Mark's inside is entirely
different from anything I had imagined.
I had expected a grove of pillars instead
of these wonderful breadths of wall ; and
the marble overlay I had not understood
at all till I saw it. My admiration
mounts every time I enter : it has a
different gloom from any I have ever been
in, more joyous and satisfying, not in the
least moody as our own Gothic seems
sometimes to be; and saints instead of
devils look at you solemn-eyed from
every corner of shade.
A heavy rain turns the Piazza into a
lake : this morning Arthur had to carry
me across. Other foolish Englishwomen
were shocked at such means, and paddled
their own leaky canoes, or stood on the
brink and looked miserable. The effect
of rain-pool reflections on the inside of
LOVE-LETTERS 167
St. Mark's is noticeable, causing it to
bloom unexpectedly into fresh subtleties
and glories. The gold takes so sympa-
thetically to any least tint of colour that
is in the air, and counts up the altar
candles even unto its furthest recesses
and cupolas.
I think before 1 leave Venice I shall
find about ten Tintorettos which I really
like. Best of all is that Bacchus and
Ariadne in the Ducal Palace, of which
you gave me the engraving. His ' ^lar-
riage of St. Catherine,' which is there
also, has all Veronese's charm of colour
and what I call his ' breeding ' ; and in
the ceiling of the Council Chamber is one
splendid figure of a sea-youth striding a
dolphin.
Last evening we climbed the San
Giorgio campanile for a sunset view of
Venice ; it is a much better point of view
than the St. Mark's one, and we were
lucky in our sunset. Venice again
looked like a beautified factory town,
blue and blue with smoke and evenino;
mists. Down below in the church I met
a delightful Capuchin priest who could
talk French, and "^ poor, very young
168 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
lay-brother who had the holy custody of
the eyes heavily upon his conscience
when I spoke to him. I was so sorry
for him !
The Mother-Aunt is ill in bed ; but as
she is at the present moment receiving
three visitors, you will understand about
how ill. The fact is, she is worn to
death with sight-seeing. I can't stop
her ; while she is on her legs it is her
duty, and she will. The consequence is
I get rushed through things I want to
let soak into me, and have to go again.
My only way of getting her to rest has
been by deserting her ; and then I come
back and receive reproaches with a meek
countenance.
Mr. C has been good to us and
cordial, and brings his gondola often to
our service. A gondola and pair has
quite a different motion from a one-oared
gondola ; it is like riding a sea-horse
instead of a sea- cam el — almost exciting,
only it is so soft in its prancings.
He took A. and myself into the pro-
cession which welcomed the crowned
heads last Wednesday ; the hurly-burly
of it was splendid. We tore down the
LOVE-LETTERS 169
Grand Ciinal from end to end, almost
cheek by jowl with the royalties ; the
M.A. was quite jubilant when she heard
we had had such 'good places.' Hundreds
of gondolas swarmed round ; many of
them in the old Carpaccio rig-outs, very
gorgeous though a little tawdry when
taken out of the canvas. But the rush
and the collisions, and the sound of many
waters walloping under the bellies of the
gondolas, and the blows of fighting oars
— resrular underwater wrestlincr matches
— made it as vivid and amusing as a pro-
longed Oxford and Cambridge boat-race in
fancy costume. Our gondoliers streamed
with the exertion, and looked like men
fighting a real battle, and yet enjoyed it
thoroughly. Violent altercations with
police-boats don't ruffle them at all; at
one moment it looks daggers drawn ; at
the next it is shrugs and smiles. Often,
from not knowincr enoufjh of Italian and
Italian ways, I get hot all over when an
ordinary discussion is going on, thinking
that blows are about to be exchanged.
The Mother-Aunt had huni; a wonderful
satin skirt out of window for decoration ;
and when she leaned over it in a bodice
170 AN ENi^lLTSH WOMAN'S
of the same colour, it looked as if she
were sitting with her legs out as well !
I suppose it was this peculiar effect that,
when the King and Queen came by
earlier in the morning, won for her a
special bow and smile.
I must hurry or I shall miss the post
that I wish to catch. There seems little
chance now of my getting you in Venice ;
but elsewhere perhaps you will drop to
me out of the clouds.
Your own and most loving.
LOVE-LETTERS 171
LETTER XXXIX
My own, own Beloved, — Say that my
being away does not seem too long ? I
have not had a letter yet, and that makes
me somehow not anxious but compunc-
tious ; only writing to you of all I do
helps to keep me in good conscience.
Not the other foot gone to the mender's,
I hope, with the same obstructive
accompaniments as went to the setting-
up again of the last ? If I don't hear
soon, you will have me dancing on wires,
which cost as much by the word as a
gondola by the hour.
Yesterday we went to see Carpaccio
at his best in San Giorgio di Schiavone :
two are St. George pictures, three St.
Jeromes, and two of some other saint
unknown to me. The St. Jerome series
is really a homily on the love and pathos
of animals. First is St. Jerome in his
172 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
study v/itli a sort of undipped white
poodle in the pictorial place of honour,
all alone on a floor beautifully swept and
garnished, looking up wistfully to his
master busy at writing (a Benjy saying,
' Come and take me for a walk, there 's
a good saint ! '). Scattered among the
adornments of the room are small bronzes
of horses and, I think, birds. So, of
course, these being his tastes, when St.
Jerome goes into the wilderness, a lion
takes to him, and accompanies him when
he pays a call on the monks in a neigh-
bouring monastery. Thereupon, holy
men of little faith, the entire fi'aternity
take to their heels and rush upstairs, the
hindermost clinging to the skirts of the
formermost to be hauled the quicker
out of harm's way. And all the while
the lion stands incorrectly offering the
left paw, and Jerome with shrugs tries
to explain that even the best butter
wouldn't melt in his dear lion's mouth.
After that comes the tragedy. St.
Jerome lies dying in excessive odour of
sanctity, and all the monks crowd round
him with prayers and viaticums, and the
ordinary stuffy pieties of a * happy death,'
LOVE-LETTERS 173
while Jerome wonders feebly what it is
he misses in all this to-do for which he
cares so little. And there, elbowed far
out into the cold, the lion lies and lifts
his poor head and howls because he
knows his master is being taken from
him. Quite near to him, fastened to
a tree, a c[ueer, nondescript, crocodile-
shaped dog runs out the length of its
tether to comfort the disconsolate beast :
but la hete humaine has got the whip-
hand of the situation. In another pic-
ture is a parrot that has just mimicked
a dog, or called ' Carlo ! ' and then
laughed : the dog turns his head away
with a sleek, sheepish, shy look, exactly
as a sensitive dog does when you make
fun of him.
These are, perhaps, mere undercurrents
of pictures which are quite glorious in
colour and design, but they help me to
love Carpaccio to distraction ; and when
the others lose me, they hunt through
all the Carpaccios in Venice till they
find me !
Love me a little more if possible while
I am so long absent from you ! What
I do and what I think go so much to-
174 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
gether now, that you will take what I
write as the most of me that it is possible
to cram in, coming back to you to share
everything.
Under such an Italian sky as to-day
how I would like to see your face !
Here, dearest, among these palaces you
would be in your peerage, for I think
you have some southern blood in you.
Curious that, with all my fairness,
somebody said to me to-day, ' But you
are not quite English, are you ? ' And I
swore by the nine gods of my ancestry
that I was nothing else. But the look
is in us : my father had a foreign air, but
made up for it by so violent a patriotism
that Uncle N. used to call him ' John
Bull let loose.'
My love to England. Is it shewing
much autumn yet? My eyes long for
green fields again. Since I have been in
Italy I had not seen one until the other
day from the top of St. Giorgio Mag-
giore, where one lies in hiding under the
monastery walls.
All that I see now quickens me to
fresh thoughts of you. Yet do not
expect me to come back wiser : my last
LOVE-LETTERS 175
effort at wisdom was to fall in love with
you, and there I stopped for good and
all. There I am still, everything in-
cluded : what do you want more ? My
letter and my heart both threaten to be
over- weight, so no more of them this
time. Most dearly do I love you.
176 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER XL
Beloved,— If two days slip by, I don't
know where I am when I come to write ;
things get so crowded in such a short
space of time. Where I left off I know
not : I will begin where I am most
awake — your letter which I have just
received.
That is well, dearest, that is well
indeed : a truce till February I And
since the struggle then must needs be
a sharp one — with only one end, as we
know, — do not vex her now by any overt
signs of preparation as if you assumed
already that her final arguments were to
be as so much chaff before the wind.
You do not tell me xvhat she argues, and
I do not ask. She does not say I shall
not love you enough !
To answer businesslike to your ques-
tions first : with your forgiveness we
LOVE-LETTERS 177
stay here till the 25th, and get back to
England with the last of the month.
Does that seem a very cruel, far-off date?
Others have the wish to stay even longer,
and it would be no fairness to hurry them
beyond a certain degree of reasonableness
with my particular reason for impatience,
seeing, moreover, that in your love I
have every help for remaining patient.
It is too much to hope, I suppose, that
the ' truce ' sets you free now, and that
you could meet us here after all, and pro-
long our stay indefinitely ? I know one
besides myself who would be glad, and
would welcome an outside excuse dearly.
For, oh, the funniness of near and dear
things ! Arthur's heart is laid up with a
small love affair, and it is the comicalest
of internal maladies. He is screwing up
courage to tell me all about it, and I
write in haste before my mouth is sealed
by his confidences. I fancy I know the
party, an energetic little mortal whom we
met at Lucerne, where Arthur lingered
while we came on to Florence. She talked
vaguely of being in Venice some time
this autumn ; and the vagueness con-
tinues. Arthur, in consequence, roams
M
178 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
round disconsolately with no interest but
in hotel books. And for fear lest we
should gird up his loins and drag him
away with us out of Paradisal possibili-
ties, he is for ever praising Venice as a
resting-place, and saying he wants to be
nowhere else. The bathing just keeps
him alive ; but when put to it to explain
what charms him since pictures do not,
and architecture only slightly, he says in
exemplary brotherly fashion that he likes
to see me completing my education and
enthusiasms, — and does not realise with
how foreign an air that explanation sits
upon his shoulders.
I saw to-day a remnant of your patron
saint, and for your sake transferred a kiss
to it, Italian fashion, with my thumb and
the sign of the cross. I hope it will do
you good. Also, I have been up among
the galleries of St. Mark's, and about the
roof and the west front where somebody
or another painted his picture of the
bronze horses.
The pigeons get to recognise people
personally, and grow more intimate
every time we come. I even conceive
they make favourites, for I had three
LOVE-LETTEKS 179
pecking food out of my mouth to-day
and refusing to take it in any other
fashion, and they coo and say thank you
before and after every seed they take or
spill. They are quite the pleasantest of
all the Italian beggars — and the cleanest.
Your friend pressed us in to tea yester-
day : I think less for the sake of giving
us tea than that we should see his palace,
or rather his first floor, in which alone he
seems to lose himself. I have no idea for
measurements, but I imagine his big sala
is about eighty feet long and perhaps
twenty-five feet across, with a flat-beamed
roof, windows at each end, and portieres
along the walls of old blue Venetian
linen : a place in which it seems one
could only live and think nobly. His
face seems to respond to its teachings.
What more might not an environment
like that bring out in you ? Come and
let me see ! I have hopes springing
as I think of things that you may be
coming after all ; and that that is what lay
concealed under the gaiety of your last
paragraph. Then I am more blessed even
than I knew. What, you are coming ?
So well I do love you, my Beloved I
180 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER XLl
Dearest, — This letter will travel with
me : we leave to-day. Our movements
are to be too restless and uncomfortable
for the next few days for me to have a
chance of quiet seeing or quiet writing
anywhere. At Riva we shall rest, I
hope.
Yesterday a storm began coming over
towards evening, and I thought to myself
that if it passed in time there should be a
splendid sunset of smoulder and glitter
to be seen from the Campanile, and per-
haps by good chance a rainbow.
I went alone : when I got to the top the
rain was pelting hard ; so there I stayed
happily weather-bound for an hour looking
over Venice ' silvered with slants of rain,'
and watching umbrellas scuttering below
with toes beneath them. The golden
smoulder was very slow in coming : it lay
LOVE-LETTERS 181
over tlie mainland and came creeping
along the railway track. Then came the
glitter and the sun, and I turned round
and found my rainbow. Eut it wasn't a
bow, it was a circle : the Campanile
stood up as it were a spoke in the
middle, — the lower curve of the rainbow
]ay on the ground of the Piazzetta, cut
off sharp by the shadow of the Campanile.
It was worth waiting an hour to see.
The islands shone mellow and bright in
the clearance with the storm going off
black behind them. Good-bye, Venice !
Verona began by seeming dull to me ;
but it improves and unfolds beautiful
corners of itself to be looked at : only 1
am given so little time. The Tombs of
the Delia Scalas and the Renaissance
facade of the Consiglio are what chiefly
delight me. I had some quiet hours in
the Museo, where I fell in love with a
little picture by an unknown painter, of
Orpheus charming the beasts in a wan-
dering green landscape, with a dance of
fauns in the distance, and here and there
Eurydice running ; — and Orpheus in
Hades, and the Thracian women killing
182 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
him, and a crocodile fishing out his head,
and mermaids and ducks sitting above
their reflections reflecting.
Also there is one beautiful Tobias and
the Angel there by a painter whose name
I most ungratefully forget. I saw a man
yesterday carrying fishes in the market,
each strung through the gills on a twig
of myrtle : that is how Tobias ought to
carry his fish : when a native custom
suggests old paintings, how charming it
always is !
Riva.
We have just got here from Verona.
In the matter of the garden at least it is
a Paradise of a place. A great sill of
honeysuckle leans out from my window :
beyond is a court gi*own round with
creepers, and beyond that the garden —
such a garden ! The first thing one sees
is an arcade of vines upon stone pillars,
between which peep stacks of roses,
going off a little from their glory now,
and right away stretches an alley of
green, that shows at the end, a furlong
off, the blue glitter of water. It is a
beautifully wild garden : grass and vege-
LOVE-LETTERS 183
tables and trees and roses all grow in a
jungle together. There are little groves
of bamboo and chestnut and willow ;
and a runnel of water is somewhere —
I can hear it. It suggests rest, which
I want ; and so, for all its difference,,
suggests you, whom also I want, — more,
I own it now, than I have said ! But
that went without saying. Beloved, as it
always must if it is to be the truth and
nothing short of the truth.
While this has been waiting to go,
your letter has been put into my hands.
I am too happy to say words about it,
and can afford now to let this go as
it is. The little time of waiting for
you will be perfect happiness now ; and
your coming seems to colour all that is
behind as well. I have had a good time
indeed, and was only wearying mth the
plethora of my enjoyment : but the
better time has been kept till now. We
shall be together day after day and all
day long for at least a month, I hope :
a joy that has never happened to us
.yet.
Never mind about the lost letter
now, dearest, dearest : ^-^enice was a little
184 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
empty just one week because of it.
I still hope it will come ; but what
matter ? — I know you will. All my
heart waits for you. — Your most glad
and most loving.
LOVE-LEITERS 185
LETTER XLII
Dearest, — I saw an old woman riding a
horse astride : and I was convinced on
the spot that this is the rightest way of
riding, and that the side-saddle was a
foolish and affected invention. The
horse was fine, and so was the young
man leading it : the old woman was
upright and stately, with a wide hat and
full petticoats like a INIaximilian soldier.
This was at Bozen, where we stayed
for two nights, and from which I have
brought a cold with me : it seems such
an English thing to have, that I feel
quite at home in the discomfort of it.
It had been such wonderful weather that
we were sitting out of doors every
evening up to 9.30 p.m. without wraps,
and on our heads only our ' widows' caps.'
(The M.A. persists in a style which sug-
gests that Uncle N. has gone to a better
186 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
world.) jNIine was too flimsy a work of
fiction, and a day before I had been for a
climb and got wet through, so a chill laid
its benediction on my head, and here I
am, — not seriously incommoded by the
malady, but by the remedy, which is the
M.A. full of kind quackings and fierce
tyranny if I do but put my head out of
window to admire the view, whose best
is a little round the corner.
I had no idea Innsbruck was so high
up among the mountains : snows are on
the peaks all round. Behind the house-
tops, so close and near, lies a quarter circle
of white crests. You are told that in
winter creatures come down and look in
at the windows : sometimes they are
called wolves, sometimes bears — any way
the feeling is mediaeval.
Hereabouts the wayside shrines nearly
always contain a crucifix, whereas in
Italy that was rare — the Virgin and Child
being the most common. I remarked
on this, which I suppose gave rise to a
subsequent observation of the INI.A. s :
' I think the Tyrolese are a good people :
they are not given over to Mariolatry
like those poor priest-ridden Italians.' I
LOVE-LETTERS 187
think, however, that they merely have
that fundamental grace, religious sim-
plicity, worshipping — just what they can
get, for yesterday I saw two dear old
bodies going round and telling their
beads before the bronze statues of the
Maximilian tomb — King Arthur, Charles
the Bold, etc. 1 suppose, by mere asso-
ciation, a statue helps them to pray.
The national costume does look so
nice, though not exactly beautiful. I
like the flat, black hats with long
streamers behind and a gold tassel, and
the spacious apron. Blue satin is a
favourite style, always silk or satin for
Sunday best : one I saw of pearl-white
brocade.
Since we came north we have had
lovely weather, except the one day of
which I am still the filterings : and morn-
ing along the Brenner Pass was perfect. I
think the mountains look most beautiful
quite early, at sunrise, when they are all
pearly and mysterious.
We go on to Zurich on Thursday, and
then, Beloved, and then ! — so this must
be my last letter, since I shall have
nowhere to write to with you rushing
188 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
all across Europe and resting nowhere
because of my impatience to have you.
The JNIother-Aunt concedes a whole
month, but Arthur will have to leave
earlier for the beginning of term. How
little my two dearest men htive yet seen
of each other ! Barely a week lies
between us : this will scarcely catch you.
Dearest of dearests, my heart waits on
yours.
LOVE-LE'lTERS 189
LETTER XLIII
My Dearest, — See what an effect your
' gallous young hound ' episode has had
on me. I send it back to you roughly
done into rhyme. I don't know whether
it will carry ; for, outside your telling of
it, * Johnnie Kigarrow ' is not a name of
heroic sound. What touches me as so
strangely complete about it is that you
should have got that impression and
momentary romantic delusion as a child,
and now hear, years after, of his disap-
pearing out of life thus fittingly and
mysteriously, so that his name will fix
its legend to the countryside for many
a long day. I would like to go there
some day with you, and standing on
Twloch Hill imagine all the country
round as the burial-place of the strong
man on whose knees my beloved used
to play when a child.
190 AN ENGLISHWOMAVS
It must have been soon after this
that your brother died : truly, dearest,
from now, and strangely, this Johnnie
Kisarrow will seem more to me than
him; touching a more heroic strain of
idea, and stiffening fibres in your nature
that brotherhood, as a rule, has no bear-
ing on.
A short letter to-day, Beloved, because
what goes with it is so long. This is the
first time I have come before your eyes
as anything but a letter-writer, and I
am doubtful whether you will care to
have so much all about yourself. Yet
for that very reason think how much I
loved doing it ! I am jealous of those days
before I knew you, and want to have all
their wild-honey flavour for myself. Do
remember more, and tell me ! Dearest
heart, it was to me you were coming
through all your scampers and ramblings;
no wonder, with that unknown good
running parallel, that my childhood was
a happy one. May long life bless you,
Beloved 1
LOVE-LETTERS 191
(Enclosure)
My brother and I were down in Wales,
And listened by night to the Welshman's tales ;
He was eleven and I was ten.
We sat on the knees of the farmer's men
After the whole day's work was done :
And I was friends with the farmer's son.
His hands were rough as his arms were strong,
His mouth was merry and loud for song :
Each night when set by the ingle-wall
He was the merriest man of them all.
I would catch at his beard and say
All the things I had done in the day —
Tumbled boulders over the force,
Swum in the river and fired the gorse —
* Half the side of the hill ! ' quoth I :—
* Ah ! ' cried he, * and didn't you die ? '
' Chut ! ' said he, * but the squeak was narrow '
Didn't you meet with Johnnie Kigarrow .-* '
* No ! ' said I, 'and who will he be .''
And what will be Johnnie Kigarrow to me?'
The farmer's son said under his breath,
* Johnnie Kigarrow may be your death !
Listen you here, and keep you still —
Johnnie Kigarrow bides under the hill ;
Twloch bari'ow stands over his head ;
He shallov/s the river to make his bed :
Boulders roll when he stirs a limb;
And the gorse on the hills belongs to him !
And if so be one fires his gorse.
He 's out of his bed, and he mounts his horse.
Off he sets : with the first long stride
He is halfway over the mountain side :
192 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
With his second stride he has crossed the barrow^
And he has you fast, lias Johnnie Kigarrow ! '
Half I laughed and half I feared ;
I clutched and tugged at the strong man's beard;
And bragged as brave as a boy could be —
* So ? but, you see, he didn't catch me ! '
Fear caught hold of me : what had I done ?
High as the roof rose the farmer's son :
How the sight of him froze my marrow !
' 1/ he cried, ' am Johnnie Kigarrow ! '
Well, you wonder, what was the end ?
Never forget ; — he had called me ' friend ' !
Mighty of limb, and hard, and brown ;
Quickly he laughed and set me down.
' Heh ! ' said he, 'but the squeak was nari'ow.
Not to be caught by Johnnie Kigarrow ! '
Now, I hear, after years gone by.
Nobody knows how he came to die.
He strode out one night of storm :
' Get you to bed, and keep you warm ! "
Out into darkness so went he :
Nobody knows where his bones may be.
Only I think — if his tongue let go
Truth that once, — how perhaps / know.
Twloch river, and Twloch barrow,
Do you cover my Johnnie Kigarrow ?
LOVE-LETTERS 193
LETTER XLIV
Dearest, — I have been doing some-
thing so wise and foolish : mentally wise,
I mean, and physically foolish. Do you
guess ? — Disobeying your parting injunc-
tion, and sitting up to see eclipses.
It was such a luxury to do as I was not
told just for once; to feel there was an
independent me still capable of asserting
itself. INly belief is that, waking, you
hold me subjugated : but, once your god-
head has put on its spiritual nightcap,
and begun nodding, your mesmeric in-
fluence relaxes. Up starts resolution and
independence, and I breathe desolately
for a time, feeling myself once more a
free woman.
Twas a tremulous experience. Beloved;
but I loved it all the more for that.
How we love playing at grief and death
— the two things that must come — before
N
194 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
it is their due time I I took a look at
my world for three most mortal hours
last night, trying to see you out of it.
And oh, how close it kept bringing me !
I almost heard you breathe, and was for
ever wondering — Can we ever be nearer,
or love each other more than we do ?
For that we should each want a sixth
sense, and a second soul : and it would
still be only the same spread out over
larger territory. I prefer to keep it
nesting close in its present limitations,
where it feels like a ' growing pain ' :
children have it in their legs, we in our
hearts.
I am growing sleepy as I write, and
feel I am sending you a dull letter, — my
penalty for doing as you forbade.
I sat up from half-past one to a quarter
to five to see our shadow go over heaven.
I didn't see much, the sky was too
piebald : but I was not disappointed, as
I had never watched the darkness into
dawn like that before : and it was in-
teresting to hear all the persons awaking:
— cocks at half- past four, frogs im-
mediately after, then pheasants and
various others following. I was cuddled
LOVE-LETTERS 195
close up against my window, throned in
a big arm-chair with many pillows, a
spirit-lamp, cocoa, bread-and-butter, and
buns; so I fared well. Just after the
pheasants and the first querulous fidget-
ings of hungry blackbirds comes a soft
pattering along the path below: and
Benjy, secretive and important, is fussing
his way to tlie shrubbery, when instinct
or real sentiment prompts him to look
up at my window ; he gives a whimper
and a wag, and goes on. I try to per-
suade myself that he didn't see me, and
that he does this, other mornings, when
I am not thus perversely bolstered up
in rebellion, and peering through blinds
at wrong hours. Isn't there something
pathetic in the very idea that a dog may
have a behind-your-back attachment of
that sort ? — that every morning he looks
up at an unresponsive blank, and wags,
and goes by ?
I heard him very happy in the shrubs a
moment after : he and a pheasant, I fancy,
disputing over a question of boundaries.
And he comes in for breakfast, three
hours later, looking positively fresh, and
wants to know why I am yawning.
196 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
Most mornings he brings your letter
up to my room in his mouth. It is
old Nan -nan's joke : she only sends up
yours so, and pretends it is Benjy's own
clever selection. I pretend that, too,
to him ; and he thinks he is doing some-
thing wonderful. The other morning I
was — well, Benjy hears splashing : and
tires of waiting — or his mouth waters.
An extra can of hot water happens
to stand at the door; and therein he
deposits his treasure (mine, I mean), and
retires saying nothing. The consequence
is, when I open three minutes after his
scratch, I find you all ungummed and
swimming, your beautiful handwriting
bleared, and smeared, so that no eye but
mine could have read it. Benjy's shame
when I showed him what he had done
was wonderful.
How it rejoices me to write quite
foolish things to you I — that I can helps
to explain a great deal in the up-above
order of things, which I never took in
when I was merely young and frivolous.
One must have touched a grave side of
life before one can take in that Heaven
is not opposed to laughter.
LOVE-LETTERS 197
My eye has just caught back at what
I have written; and the 'httle death'
runs through me, just because I wrote
' grave side.' It shouldn't, but loving has
made me superstitious : the happiness
seems too great ; how can it go on ? I
keep thinking — this is not hfe : you are
too much for me, my dearest !
Oh, my Beloved, come quickly to
meet me to-day : this morning ! Ride
over ; I am willing it. My own dearest,
you must come. If you don't, what shaU
I believe ? That Love cannot outdo
space : that when you are away I cannot
reach you by willing. But I can : come
to me ! You shall see my arms open to
you as never before. What is it? — you
must be coming. I have more love in
me after all than I knew.
Ah, I know : I wrote ' grave side,'
and all my heart is in arms against the
treason. With us it is not ' till death us
do part ' : we leap it altogether, and are
clasped on the other side.
IMy dear, my dear, I lay my head down
on your heart : I love you ! I post this
to show how certain I am. At 12 to-dav
I shall see you.
198 AN ENGLlSHWOMAxVS
LETTER XLV
Beloved, — I look at this ridiculous
little nib now, running like a plough
along the furrows ! What can the poor
thing do ? Bury its poor black, blunt
little nose in the English language in
order to tell you, in all sorts of round-
about ways, what you know already as
well as I do. And yet, though that is
all it can do, you complain of not having
had a letter ! Not had a letter ? Beloved,
there are half a hundred I have not had
from you ! Do you suppose you have
ever, any one week in your life, sent me
as manv as I wanted ?
Now, for once, I did hold off and
didn't write to you : because there was
something in your last I couldn't give
any answer to, and I hoped you would
come yourself before I need. Then I
hoped silence would bring you : and now
LOVE-LETTERS 199
— no ! — instead of your dear peace-giving
face I get this complaint !
Ah, Beloved, have you in reality any
complaint, or sorrow that I can set at
rest ? Or has that little, little silence
made you anxious ? I do come to think
so, for you never flourish your words
about as I do : so, believing that, I would
Uke to write again differently ; only it is
truer to let what I have written stand,
and make amends for it in all haste. I
love you so infinitely well, how could
even a year's silence give you any doubt
or anxiety, so long as you knew I was
not ill ?
' Should one not make great con-
cessions to great grief even when it is
unreasonable? ' I cannot answer, dearest:
I am in the dark. Great grief cannot be
great without reasons : it should give
them, and you should judge by them : —
you, not I. I imagine you have again
been face to face with fierce, unexplained
opposition. Dearest, if it would give
you happiness, I would say, make five,
ten, twenty years' ' concession,' as you
call it. But the only time you ever
spoke to me clearly about your mother's
200 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
mind towards me, you said she wanted
an absolute surrender from you, not
covered only by her lifetime. Then
though I pitied her, I had to smile. A
twenty years' concession even would not
give rest to her perturbed spirit. I pray
truly — having so much reason for your
sake to pray it — ' God rest her soul !
and give her a saner mind towards both
of us.'
Why has this come about at all ?
It is not February yet : and our plans
have been putting forth no buds before
their time. When the day comes, and
you have said the inevitable word, I
think more calm will follow than you
expect. You, dearest, I do understand :
and the instinct of tenderness you have
towards a claim which yet fills you with
the sense of its injustice. I know that
you can laugh at her threat to make
you poor; but' not at hurting her affec-
tions. Did your asking for an ' answer '
mean that I was to write so openly ?
Bless you, my own dearest.
LOVE-LETTERS 201
LETTER XLVI
Dearest, — To-day I came upon a strange
spectacle : poor old Nan-nan weeping for
wounded pride in me. I found her stitch-
ing at raiment of needlework that is to
be mine (piles of it have been through
her fingers since the word first went out ;
for her love asserts that I am to go all
home-made from my old home to my
new one — wherever that may be !). And
she was weeping because, as I slowly
got to understand, from one particular
quarter too little attention had been paid
to me : — the kow-tow of a ceremonious
reception into my new status had not
been deep enough to make amends to
her heart for its partial loss of me.
Her deferential recognition of the
change which is coming is pathetic and
full of etiquette ; it is at once so jealous
and so unselfish. Because her sense
202 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
of the proprieties will not allow her
to do so much longer, she comes up
to my room and makes opportunity to
scold me over quite slight things : — and
there I am, meeker under her than I
would be to any relative. So to-day I
had to bear a statement of your mother's
infirmities rigorously outlined in a way
I could only pretend to be deaf to until
she had done. Then I said, 'Nan-nan,
go and say your prayers ! ' And as she
stuck her heels down and refused to go,
there I left the poor thing, not to prayer,
I fear, but to desolate weeping, in which
love and pride will get more firmly
entangled together than ever.
I know when I go up to my room next
I shall find fresh flowers put upon my
table : but the grievous old dear will be
carrying a sore heart that I cannot com-
fort by any words. I cannot convince
her that I am not hiding in myself any
wounds such as she feels on my behalf.
I write this, dearest, as an indirect
answer to yours, — which is but Nan-nan's
woe writ large. If I could persuade
your two dear and very different heads
how very slightly wounded I am by a
LOVE-LETTERS 203
thing which a httle waiting will bring
right, I could give it even less thought
than I do. Are you keeping the truce
in spirit when you disturb yourself like
this? Trust me, Beloved, always to be
candid : I will complain to you when
I feel in need of comfort. Be comforted
yourself, meanwhile, and don't shape
ghosts of grief which never do a goose-
step over me ! Ah well, well, if there is
a way to love you better than I do now,
only show it me ! Meantime, think of
me as your most contented and happy-
go-loving.
204 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER XLVII
Dearest, — I am haunted by a line of
quotation, and cannot think where it
comes from : —
* Now sets the year in roaring grey.'
Can you help me to what follows ? If it
is a true poem it ought now to be able to
sing itself to me at large from an outer
world which at this moment is all grey
and roaring. To-day the year is bowing
itself out tempestuously, as if angry at
having to go. Dear golden year ! I am
sorry to see its face so changed and
withering : it has held so much for us
both. Yet I am feeling vigorous and
quite like spring. All the seasons have
their marches, with bufFetings and border-
forays : this is an autumn march-wind ;
before long I shall be out into it, and up
the hill to look over at your territory
LOVE-LETTERS 205
and you being swept and garnished for
the seven devils of winter.
'Roaring grey' suggests Tennyson,
whom I do very much associate with
this sort of weather, not so much because
of passages in Maud and In Memoriavi
as because I once went over to Swainston,
on a day such as this when rooks and
leaves alike hung helpless in the wind ;
and heard there the story of how Tenny-
son, coming over for his friend's funeral,
would not go into the house, but asked for
one of Sir John's old hats, and with that
on his head sat in the garden and wrote
almost the best of his small lyrics : —
'Nightingales warbled without.
Within was weeping for thee.'
The *old hat' was mentioned as somethinoc
humorous : yet an old glove is the most
accepted symbol of faithful absence : and
why should head rank lower than hand ?
What creatures of convention we are !
There is an old notion, quite likely to
be true, that a nightcap carries in it the
dreams of its first owner, or that any-
thing laid over a sleeper's head will bring
away the dream. One of the stories
206 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
which used to put a lump in my throat
as a child was of an old backwoodsman
who by that means found out that his
dog stole hams from the storeroom.
The dog was given away in disgrace,
and came to England to die of a broken
heart at the sight of a cargo of hams,
which, at their unpacking, seemed like a
monstrous day of judgment — the bones
of his misdeeds rising again reclothed
with flesh to reproach him with the thing
he had never forgotten.
I wonder how long it was before I left
off definitely choosing out a story for the
pleasure of making myself cry ! When
one begins to avoid that luxury of the
fledgling emotions, the first leaf of youth
is flown.
To-day I look almost jovially at the
decay of the best year I have ever lived
through, and am your very middle-aged
faithful and true.
LOVE-LEITERS jeOT
LETTER XLVIII
Dearest, — If anybody has been ' calling
me names ' that are not mine, they do me
a fine injury, and you did well to purge
the text of their abuse. I agree with
no authority, however immortal, which
inquires * What 's in a name ? ' expecting
the answer to be a snap of the fingers.
I answer with a snap of temper that the
blood, boots, and bones of my ancestors
are in mine ! Do you suppose I could
have been the same woman had such
names as Amelia or Bella or Cinderella
been clinging leechlike to my conscious-
ness through all the years of my training ?
Why, there are names I can think of
which would have made me break down
into side-ringlets had I been forced to
wear them audibly.
The effect is not so absolute when it
is a second name that can be tucked away
208 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
if unpresentable, but even then it is a
misfortune. There is C , now, who
won't marry, I believe, chiefly because
of the insane * Annie ' with which she
was smitten at the baptismal font by an
afterthought. She regards it as a taint
in her constitution which orders her to
a lonely life lest worse might follow.
And apply the consideration more pub-
licly : do you imagine the Prince of Wales
will be the same sort of king if, when he
comes to the throne, he calls himself
King Albert Edward in florid Continental
fashion, instead of ' Edward the Seventh,'
with a right hope that an Edward the
Eighth may follow after him, to make
a neck-and-neck race of it with the
Henries ? I don't know anything that
would do more to knit up the English
constitution : but whenever I pass the
Albert JNIemorial I tremble lest filial
piety will not allow the thing to be
done.
Now of all this I had an instance in
the village the day before yesterday. At
the corner house by the post-office, as I
went by, a bird opened his bill and sang
a note, and down, down, down, down he
LOVE-LETTERS 209
went over a golden scale : pitched afresh,
and dropped down another ; and then up,
up, up, over tlie range of both. Then he
flung back his shabby head and laughed.
*In all my father's realm there are no
such bells as these ! ' It was the laughing
jackass. ' Who gave you your name ? '
*My godfiithers and my godmothers in
my baptism.' Well, his will have that to
answer for, however safely for the rest he
may have eschewed the world, the flesh,
and the devil. Poor bird, to be set to sing
to us under such a burden : — of which,
unconscious failure, he knows nothing.
Here I have remembered for you a bit
of a poem that took hold of me some
while ago and touched on the same
unkindness : only here the flower is
conscious of the wrong done to it, and
looks forward to a day of juster judg-
ment : —
' What have I done ? — Man came
(There 's nothing that sticks like dirt).
Looked at me with eyes of blame.
And called me " Squinancy-wort ! "
What have I done? I linger
(I cannot say that I live)
In the happy lands of my birth ;
Passers-by point with the finger ;
O
210 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
For me the light of the sun
Is darkened. Oh, what would I give
To creep away, and hide my shame in the
earth !
What have I done ?
Yet there is hope. I have seen
Many changes since I began.
The web-footed beasts have been
(Dear beasts !) — and gone, being part of some
wider plan.
Perhaps in His infinite mercy God will remove
this man ! '
Now I am on sentiment and unjust
judgments : here is another instance, where
evidently in life I did not love well
enough a character nobler than this
capering and accommodating boy Benjy,
who toadies to all my moods. Calling
at the lower farm, I missed him whom
I used to nickname ' Manger,' because
his dog-jaws always refused to smile on
me. His old mistress gave me a pathetic
account of his last days. It was the
muzzling order that broke his poor old
heart. He took it as an accusation on a
point where, though of a melancholy
disposition, his reputation had been spot-
less. He never lifted his head nor smiled
asrain. And not all his mistress's love
LOVE-LETTERS 211
could explain to him that he was not in
fault. She wept as she told it me.
Good-bye, dearest, and for this letter so
full of such little worth call me what
names you like ; and I will go to Jemima,
Keziah, and Keren-happuch for the
patience in which they must have taken
after their father when he so named
them, I suppose for a discipline.
My Beloved, let my heart come where
it wants to be. Twilight has been on
me to-day, I don't know why ; and I have
not written it off as I hoped to do. — All
yours and nothing left.
212 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER XLIX
Dearest, — I suppose your mother's con-
tinued absence, and her unexplanation of
her further stay, must be taken for un-
yielding disapproval, and tells us what to
expect of February. It is not a cordial
form of * truce ' : but since it lets me see
just twice as much of you as I should
otherwise, I will not complain so long as
it does not make you unhappy. You
write to her often and kindly, do you
not?
Well, if this last letter of hers frees
you sufficiently, it is quite settled at this
end that you are to be with us for
Christmas : — read into that the warmest
corners of a heart already fully occupied.
I do not think of it too much, till I am
assured it is to be.
Did you go over to Pembury for the
day ? Your letter does not say anything :
LOVE-LETTERS 213
but your letters have a wonderful way
with them of leaving out things of out-
side importance. I shall hear from the
rattle of returning fire-engines some day
that Hatterling has been burned down :
and you will arrive cool the next day
and say, ' Oh yes, it is so ! '
I am sure you have been right to
secure this pledge of independence to
yourself: but it hurts me to think what
a deadly offence it may be both to her
tenderness for you and her pride and stern
love of power. To realise suddenly that
Hatterling does not mean to you so
much as the power to be your own master
and happy in your own w^ay, which is
altogether opposite to her way, will be
so much of a blow that at first you will
be able to do nothing to soften it.
February fill-dyke is likely to be true
to its name, this coming one, in all that
concerns us and our fortunes. Mean-
while, if at Pembury you brought things
any nearer settlement, and are not
coming so soon as to-morrow, let me
know : for some things of ' outside im-
portance ' do affect me unfavourably
while in suspense. I have not your
214 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
serene determination to abide the work-
ings of Kismet when once all that can be
done is done.
The sun sets now, when it does so
visibly, just where Pembury is. I take
it as an omen. In your diary to-morrow
you may write down in the business
column that you have had a business letter
from me, or as near to one as I can go :
— chiefly for that it requires an answer
on this matter of 'outside importance,'
which otherwise you will altogether
leave out. But you will do better still
to come. My whole heart goes out to
fetch you : my dearest dear, ever your
own.
LOVE-LETTERS 215
LETTER L
Beloved, — No, not Browning but Tenny-
son was in my thoughts at our last ride
together : and I found myself shy, as
I have been for a long time wishing to
say things I could not. What has never
entered your head to ask becomes diffi-
cult when I wish to get it spoken. So
I bring Tennyson to tell you what I
mean : —
'Dosn't thou 'ear my 'erse's legs, as they canters
awaay ?
Proputty, proputty, proputty — that 's what I 'ears
'em saay.'
The tune of this kept me silent all the
while we galloped : this and Pembury,
a name that glows to me now like the
New Jerusalem.
And do you understand. Beloved ?
or must I say more ? My freedom has
216 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
made its nest under my uncle's roof:
but I avi a quite independent person in
other ways besides character.
Well, Pembury was settled on your
own initiative : and I looked on proud
and glad. Now I have my own little
word to add, merely a tail that wags
and makes merry over a thing decided
and done. Do you forgive me for this :
and for the greater offence of being quite
shy at having to write it ?
My Aunt thanks you for the game :
for my part I cannot own that it will
taste sweeter to me for being your own
shooting. And please, whatever else
you do big and grand and dangerous,
respect my superstitions and don't shoot
any larks this winter. In the spring
I would like to think that here or there
an extra lark bubbles over because I
and my whims find occasional favour
in your sight. When I ask great
favours you always grant them ; and
so, Ahasuerus, grant this little one to
your beautifully loving.
Give me the credit of being conscious
of it. Beloved : postscripts I never do
LOVE-LETTERS 217
write. I am glad you noticed it. If I
find anything left out I start another
letter : this is that other letter : it goes
into the same envelope merely for com-
pany, and signs itself yours in all state.
218 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER LI
Dearest, — It was so nice and comedy
to see the Mother- Aunt this morning
importantly opening a letter from you
all to herself with the pleasure quite
unmixed by any enclosure for me, or
any other letter in the house to me so
far as she was aware. I listened to you
with new ears, discovering that you write
quite beautifully in the style which I
never get from you. Don't, because
I admire you in your more formal form,
alter in your style to me. I prefer you
much, for my own part, formless : and
feel nearer to your heart in an unfinished
sentence than in one that is perfectly
balanced. Still I want you to know
that your cordial warmed her dear old
heart and makes her not think now that
she has let me see too much of you.
She was just beginning to worry herself
LOVE-LETTERS 219
jealously into that belief the last two
days : and Arthur's taking to you helped
to the same end. Very well ; I seem to
understand everybody's oddities now, —
having made a complete study of yours.
Best Beloved, I have your little letter
Ijdng close, and feel dumb when I try
to answer. You with your few words
make me feel a small thing with all my
unpenned rabble about me. Only you
do know so very well that I love you
better than I can ever write. This is
my first letter of the hew year : will our
letter-writing go on all this year, or will
it, as we dearly dream, die a divine death
somewhere before autumn ?
In any case, I am, dearest, your most
happy and loving.
220 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER LII
My dearest, — Arthur and the friend
went off together yesterday. I am
glad the latter stayed just long enough
after you left for me to have leisure
to find him out human. Here is the
whole story : he came and unbosomed
to me three days ago : and he said
nothing about not telling, so I tell
you. As water goes from a duck's
back, so go all things worth hearing
from me to you.
Arthur had said to him, * Come down
for a week,' and he had answered, ' Can't,
because of clothes ! ' explaining that
beyond evening-dress he had only those
he stood in. ' Well,' said Arthur,
' stand in them, then ; you look all
right.' *The question is,' said his friend,
' can I sit down ? ' However, he came ;
and was appalled to find tliat a man
LOVE-LETTERS 221
unpacked his trunk, and would in all
probability be carrying away his clothes
each night to brush them. He, con-
scious of interiors, a lining hanging in
rags, and even a patching somewhere,
had not the heart to let his one and
only day -jacket go down to the ser-
vants' hall to be sniffed over : and so
every evening when he dressed for
dinner he hid his jacket laboriously
under the permanent layers of a linen
wardrobe which stood in his room.
I had all this in the frankest manner
from him in the hour when he became
human : and my fancy fired at the
vision. Graves with a fierce eve set
on duty probing hither and thither
in search after the missing coat ; and
each night the search becoming more
strenuous and the mystery more baffling
than ever. It had a funny likeness to
the Jack Raikes episode in Evan Har-
rington^ and pleased me the more thus
cropping up in real life.
Well, I demanded there and then to
be shown the subject of so much romance
and adventure : and had the satisfac-
tion of mending it, he sitting by in
222 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
his shirt-sleeves the while, and watch-
ing delighted and without craven
apologies.
I notice it is not his own set he is
ashamed of, but only the moneyed, high-
sniffing servant -class who have no
understanding for honourable poverty :
and to be misunderstood pricks him
in the thinnest of thin places.
He told me also that he brought
only three white ties to last him for
seven days : and that Graves placed
them out in order of freshness and
cleanliness night after night : — first three
new ones consecutively, then three once
worn. After that, on the seventh day.
Graves resigned all further responsi-
bility, and laid out all three of them for
him to choose from. On the last three
days of his stay he did me the honour
to leave his coat out, declaring that
my mendings had made it presentable
before an emperor. Out of this dates
the whole of his character, and I under-
stand, what I did not, why Arthur and
he get on together.
Now the house is empty, and your
comings will be — I cannot say more
LOVE-LETTERS 223
welcome : but there will be more
room for them to be after my own
heart.
Heaven be over us both. Faithfully
your most loving.
224 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER LIII
Beloved, — I wish you could have been
with me to look out into this garden last
night when the spirit moved me there.
I had started for bed, but became sensi-
tive of something outside not normal.
Whether my ear missed the usual echoes
and so guessed a muffled world I do not
know. To open the door was like shcing
into a wedding-cake ; then, — where was
I to put a foot into that new-laid carpet
of ankle- deepness ? I hobbled out in a
pair of my uncle's. I suppose it is because
I know every tree and shrub in its true
form that snow seems to pile itself no-
where as it does here : it becomes a
s^arden of entombments. Now and then
some heap would shuffle feebly under
its shroud, but resurrection was not to
be : the Lawson cypress held out great
boxing-glove hands for me to shake and
LOVE-LETTERS 225
set free ; and the silence was wonderfuL
I padded about till I froze : this morning
I can see my big hoof-marks all over the
place, and Benjy has been scampering
about in them as if he found some flavour
of me there. The trees are already be-
ginning to shake themselves loose, and
the spell is over : but it had a wonderful
hold while it lasted. I take a breath
back into last night, and feel myself
again full of a romance without words
that I cannot explain. If you had
been there, even, I think I could have
forgotten I had you by me, the place
was so weighed down with its sense of
solitude. It struck eleven while I was
outside, and in that, too, I could hear
a muffle as if snow choked all the belfry
lattices and lay even on the outer edge
of the bell itself. Across the park there
are dead boughs cracking down under
the weight of snow ; and it would be
very like you to tramp over just because
the roads will be so impossible.
I heard yesterday a thing which made
me just a little more free and easy m
mind, though I had nothing sensibly on
my conscience. Such a good youth who
p
226 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
two years ago believed I was his only
possible future happiness, is now quite
happy with a totally different sort of
person. I had a little letter from him,
shy and stately, announcing the event.
I thought it such a friendly act, for
some have never the grace to unsay
their grievances, however much actually
blessed as a consequence of them.
With that off my mind I can come
to you swearing that there have been
no accidents on anybody's line of life
through a mistake in signals, or a flying
in the face of them, where I have had
any responsibility. As for you, and as
you know well by now, my signals were
ready and waiting before you sought for
them. ' Oh, whistle, and I '11 come to
you ! ' was their give-away attitude.
I am going down to play snowballs
with Benjy. Good-bye. If you come
you will find this letter on the hall table,
and me you will probably hear barking
behind the rhododendrons. — So much
your most loving.
LOVE-LEITERS 227
LETTER LIV
Beloved, — We have been having a great
day of tidyings out, rummaging through
years and years of accumulations — things
quite useless but which I have not liked
to throw away. My soul has been
getting such dusty answers to all sorts
of doubtful inquiries as to where on
earth this, that, and the other lay hidden.
And there were other things, the memory
of which had lain quite dead or slept,
till under the light of day they sprouted
back into life like corn from the grave
of an Egyptian mummy.
Very deep in one box I found a
stealthy little collection of secret play-
things which it used to be my fond
belief that nobody knew of but myself
It may have been Anna's graspingness,
when four years of seniority gave her
double my age, or Arthur's genial in-
228 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
stinct for destructiveness, which drove
me into such deep concealment of my
dearest idols. But, whether for those
or more mystic reasons, I know I had
dolls which I nursed only in the strictest
privacy and lavished my firmest love
upon. It was because of them that I
bore the reproach of being but a luke-
warm mother of dolls and careless of
their toilets; the truth being that my
motherly passion expended itself in
secret on certain outcasts of society
whom others despised or had forgotten.
They, on their limp and dissolute bodies,
wore all the finery I could find to pile
on them : and one shady transaction done
on their behalf I remember now with-
out pangs. There was one creature of
state whom an inconsiderate relative
had presented to Anna and myself in
equal shares. Of course Anna's became
more and more lionlike. I had very
little love for the bone of contention
myself, but the sense of injustice rankled
in me. So one day, at an unclothing,
Anna discovered that certain under-
garments were gone altogether away.
She sat aghast, questioned me, and, when
LOVE-LETTERS 229
I refused to disgorge, screamed down
vengeance from the authorities. I was
morally certain I had taken no more
than my just share, and resolution sat
on my lips under all 'threats. For a
punishment the whole ownership of the
big doll was made over to Anna : I
was no worse off, and was very con-
tented with my obstinacy. To-day I
found the beautifully wrought bodice,
which I had carried beyond reach of
even the supreme court of appeal, cloth-
ing with ridiculous looseness a rag-doll
whose head tottered on its stem like an
over-ripe plum, and whose legs had no
deportment at all : and am sending it
off in charitable surrender to Anna to
be given, bag and rag, to whichever one
of the children she likes to select.
Also I found : — would you care to
have a lock of hair taken from the head
of a child then two years old, which,
bright golden, does not match what I
have on now in the least ? I can just
remember her : but she is much of a
stranger to both of us. Why I value
it is that the name and date on the
envelope enclosing it are in my mother's
230 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
handwriting : and I suppose she loved
very much the curly treasure she then
put away. Some of the other things,
quite fuimy, I will show you the next
time you come over. How I wish that
vanished mite had mixed some of her
play-hours with yours : — you only six
miles away all the time : had one but
known ! — Now grown very old and loving,
always your own.
LOVE-LETTERS 231
LETTER LV
Beloved, — I am getting quite out of
letter-writing, and it is your doing, not
mine. No sooner do I get a line from
you than you rush over in person and
take the answer to it out of my mouth !
I have had six from you in the last
week, and believe I have only exchanged
you one : all the rest have been nipped
in the bud by your arrivals. My pen
turns up a cross nose whenever it hears
you coming now, and declares life so
dull as not to be worth living. Poor
dinky little Othello ! it shall have its
occupation again to-day, and say just
what it likes.
It likes you while you keep away:
so that's said! When I make it write
* come,' it kicks and tries to say ' don't.'
For it is an industrious minion, loves to
have work to do, and never complains of
232 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
over-hours. It is a sentimental fact
that I keep all its used-up brethren in
an enclosure together, and throw none
of them away. If once they have ridden
over paper to you, I turn them to grass
in their old age. I let this out because
I think it is time you had another laugh
at me.
Laugh, dearest, and tell me that you
have done so if you want to make me
a little more happy than I have been
this last day or two. There has
been too much thinking in the heads
of both of us. Be empty-headed for
once when you write next : whether
you write little or much, I am sure
always of your full heart : but I cannot
trust your brain to the same pressure :
it is such a Martha to headaches and
careful about so many things, and you
don't bring it here to be soothed as
often as you should — not at its most
needy moments, I mean.
Have you made the announcement?
or does it. not go till to-day ? I am
not sorry since the move comes from
her, that we have not to wait now till
February. You will feel better when
LOVE-LETTERS 233
the storm is up than when it is only
looming. This is the headachey period.
Well. Say ' well ' with me, dearest I
It is going to be well : waiting has
not suited us — not any of us, I think.
Your mother is one in a thousand, I say
that and mean it : — worth conquering as
all good things are. I would not wish
great fortune to come by too primrosy
a way. ' Canst thou draw out Leviathan
with a hook ? ' Even so, for size, is the
share of the world which we lay claim
to, and for that we must be toilers of
the deep. — Always, Beloved, your truest
and most loving.
234. AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER LVI
My own own Love, — You have given
me a spring day before the buds begin, —
the weather I have been longing for I I
had been quite sad at heart these cold
wet days, really down; — a treasonable
sadness with you still anywhere in the
world (though where in the world have
you been ?). Spring seemed such a long
way off over the bend of it, with you un-
able to come ; and it seems now another
letter of yours has got lost. (Write it
again, dearest, — all that was in it, with
any blots that happened to come : — there
was a dear smudge in to-day's, with the
whirlpool mark of your thumb quite
clear on it, — delicious to rest my face
against and feel you there.)
And so back to my spring weather :
all in a moment you gave me a whole
week of the weather I had longed after.
LOVE-LETTERS 235
For you say the sun has been shining on
vou : and I would rather have it there
than here if it refuses to be in two places
at once. Also my letters have pleased
you. When they do, I feel such a proud
mother to them! Here they fly quick
out of the nest ; but I think sometimes
they must come to you broken-winged,
with so much meant and all so badly put.
How can we ever, with our poor
handful of senses, contrive to express
ourselves perfectly? Perhaps, — I don't
know : — dearest, I love you ! I kiss you
a hundred times to the minute. If every-
thing in the world were dark round us,
could not kisses tell us quite well all that
we wish to know of each other? — me
that you were true and brave and so
beautiful that a woman must be afraid
looking at you : — and you that I was
just my very self, — loving and — no ! just
loving: I have no room for anything
more ! You have swallowed up all my
moral qualities, I have none left : I am
a beggar, where it is so sweet to beg. —
Give me back crumbs of myself ! I am
so hungry, I cannot show it, only by
kissing you a hundred times.
236 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
Dear share of the world, what a won-
derful large helping of it you are to me I
I alter Portia's complaint and swear that
'my little body is bursting with this
o-reat world.' And now it is written and
I look at it, it seems a Budge and Toddy
sort of complaint. I do thank Heaven
that the Godhead who rules in it for us
does not forbid the recognition of the
ludicrous ! C was telling me how
long ago, in her own dull Protestant
household, she heard a riddle propounded
by some indiscreet soul who did not
understand the prudish piety which
reiirned there : and saw such shocked
eyes opening all round on the sound of
it. 'What is it,' was asked, 'that a
common man can see every day but that
God never sees?' 'His equal' is the
correct answer : but even so demure and
proper a support to thistly theology was
to the ears that heard it as the hand of
Uzzah stretched out intrusively and de-
serving to be smitten. As for C ,
a twinkle of wickedness seized her, she
hazarded ' A joke ' to be the true answer,
and was ordered into banishment by the
head of that God-fearing household for
LOVE-LETTERS 237
having so successfully diagnosed the
family skeleton.
As for skeletons, why your letter
makes me so happy is that the one which
has been rubbing its ribs against you for
so long seems to have given itself a day
off, or crumbled to dissolution. And
you are yourself again, as you have not
been for many a long day. I suppose
there has been thunder, and the air is
cleared : and I am not to know any of
that side of your discomforts ?
Still I do know. You have been writ-
ing your letters with pressed lips for a
month past : and I have been a mere
toy-thing, and no helpmate to you at all
at all. Oh, why will she not love me ?
I know I am lovable except to a very
hard heart, and hers is not : it is only
like yours, reserved in its expression. It
is strange what pain her prejudice has
been able to drop into my cup of happi-
ness ; and into yours, dearest, I fear,
even more.
Oh, I love you, I love you ! I am
crying with it, having no words to
declare to you what I feel. JNIy tears
have wings in them : first semi-detached,
238 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
then detached. See, dearest, there is a
rain-stain to make this letter fruitful of
meaning !
It is sheer convention — and we, crea-
tures of habit — that tears don't come
kindly and easily to express where
laughter leaves off and a something
better begins. Which is all very un-
grammatical and entirely me, as I am
when I get off my hinges too suddenly.
Amen, amen ! When we are both a
hundred we shall remember all this very
peaceably ; and the ' sanguine flower '
will not look back at us less beautifully
because in just one spot it was inscribed
with woe. And if we with all our aids
cannot have patience, where in this
midge-bitten world is that virtue to find
a standing ?
I kiss you — how ? as if it were for the
first or the last time ? No, but for all
time. Beloved ! every time I see you or
think of you sums up my world. Love
me a little, too, and I will be as con-
tented as I am your loving.
LOVE-LETTERS 239
LETTER LVII
Come to me I I will not understand a
word you have written till you come.
Who has been using your hand to strike
me like this, and why do you lend it?
Oh, if it is she, you do not owe her that
duty ! Never write such things : — speak !
have you ever found me not listen to
you, or hard to convince ? Dearest,
dearest ! — take what I mean : I cannot
write over this gulf Come to me, — I
will believe anything you can say, but
I can believe nothing of this written.
I must see you and hear what it is you
mean. Dear heart, I am blind till I set
eyes on you again I Beloved, I have
nothing, nothing in me but love for you :
except for that I am empty I Believe
me and give me time ; I will not be
unworthy of the joy of holding you. I
am nothing if not yours I Tell this to
whoever is deceiving you.
240 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
Oh, my dearest, why did you stay
away from me to write so ? Come and
put an end to a thing which means no-
thinor to either of us. You love me :
how can it have a meaning ?
Can you not hear my heart crying ? —
I love nobody but you — do not know
what love is without you ! How can I
be more yours than I am ? Tell me,
and I will be !
Here are kisses. Do not believe your-
self till you have seen me. Oh, the pain
of having to inite, of not having your
arms round me in my misery ! I kiss
your dear blind eyes with all my heart. — -
My Loves most loved and loving.
LOVE-LETTERS 241
LETTER LVIII
No, no, I cannot read it ! What have
I done that you will not come to me ?
They are mad here, telling me to be
calm, that I am not to go to you. I too
am out of my mind — except that I love
you. I know nothing except that.
Beloved, only on my lips will I take
my dismissal from yours : not God him-
self can claim you from me till you have
done me that justice. Kiss me once
more, and then, if you can, say we must
part. You cannot ! — Ah, come here
where my heart is, and you cannot !
Have I never told you enough how I
love you ? Dearest, I have no words for
all my love : I have no pride in me.
Does not this alone tell you ? — You are
sending me away, and I cry to you to
spare me. Can I love you more than
that? What will you have of me thai
Q
242 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
I have not given ? Oh, you, the sun in
my dear heavens — if I lose you, what is
left of me ? Could you break so to
pieces even a woman you did not love ?
And me you do love, — you do. Between
all this denial of me, and all this silence
of words that you have put your name
to, I see clearly that you are still my
lover. — Your writing breaks with trying
not to say it : you say again and again
that there is no fault in me. I swear to
you, dearest, there is none, unless it be
loving you : and how can you mean
that ? For what are you and I made
for unless for each other ? With all
our difference people tell us we are
alike. We were shaped for each other
from our very birth. Have we not
proved it in a hundred days of happi-
ness, which have lifted us up to the
blue of a heaven higher than any birds
ever sang ? And now you say — taking
on you the blame for the very life-blood
in us both — that the fault is yours, and
that your fault is to have allowed me to
love you and yourself to love me !
Who has suddenly turned our love into
acrime ? Beloved, is it a sin that here on
LOVE-LETTERS 243
earth I have been seeing God through
you ? Go away from me, and He is
gone also. Ah, sweetheart, let me see
you before all my world turns into a
wilderness ! Let me know better why, —
if my senses are to be emptied of you.
My heart can never let you go. Do you
wish that it should ?
Bring your own here, and see if it can
tell me that ! Come and listen to mine !
Oh, dearest heart that ever beat, mine
beats so like yours that once together
you shall not divide their sound !
Beloved, I will be patient, believe me,
to any words you can say : but I cannot
be patient away from you. If I have
seemed to reproach you, do not think
that now. For you are to give me a
greater joy than I ever had before when
you take me in your arms again after
a week that has spelled dreadful separa-
tion. And I shall bless you for it — for
this present pain even — because the joy
will be so much greater.
Only come : I do not live till you
have kissed me again. Oh, my beloved,
how cruel love may seem if we do not
trust it enough ! JNIy trust in you has
244 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
come back in a great rush of warmth,
like a spring day after frost. I almost
laugh as I let this go. It brings you, —
perhaps before I Avake : I shall be so tired
to-night. Call under my window, make
me hear in my sleep. I will wake up to
you, and it shall be all over before the
rest of the world wakes. There is no
dream so deep that I shall not hear you
out of the midst of it. Come and be my
morning-glory to-morrow without fail.
I will rewrite nothing that I have
written — let it go ! See me out of deep
waters again, because I have thought so
much of you ! I have come through
clouds and thick darkness. I press your
name to my lips a thousand times. As
sure as sunrise I say to myself that you
will come : the sun is not truer to his
rising than you to me.
Love will go flying after this till I
sleep. God bless you ! — and me also ; it
is all one and the same wish. — Your
most true, loving, and dear faithful one.
LOVE-LETTERS 245
LETTER LIX
I HAVE to own that I know your will
now, at last. Without seeing you I am
convinced : you have a strong power in
you to have done that! You have
told me the word I am to say to you :
it is your bidding, so I say it — Good-bye.
But it is a word whose meaning I cannot
share.
Yet I have something to tell you
which I could not have dreamed if it
had not somehow been true : which has
made it possible for me to believe, with-
out hearing you speak it, that I am to
be dismissed out of your heart. — May
the doing of it cost you far less pain
than I am fearinsc !
You did not come, though I promised
myself so certainly that you would :
instead came your last very brief note
which this is to obey. Still I watched
246 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
for you to come, believing it still and
trusting to silence on my part to bring
you more certainly than any more words
could do. And at last either you came
to me, or I came to you : a bitter last
meeting. Perhaps your mind too holds
what happened, if so I have got truly
at what your will is. I must accept it as
true, since I am not to see you again.
1 cannot tell you whether I thought it
or dreamed it, but it seems still quite
real, and has turned all my past life
into a mockery.
When I came I was behind you ; then
you turned and I could see your face—
you too were in pain : in that we seemed
one. But when I touched you and
would have kissed you, you shuddered
at me and drew back your head. I
tell you this as I would tell you any-
thing unbelievable that I had heard told
of you behind your back. You see I am
obeying you at last.
For all the love which you gave me
when I seemed worthy of it I thank you
a thousand times. Could you ever re-
turn to the same mind, I should be
yours once more as I still am ; never
LOVE-LETTERS 247
ceasing on my side to be your lover and
servant till death, and — if there be any-
thing more — after as well.
My lips say amen now : but my heart
cannot say it till breath goes out of my
body. Good-bye : that means — God be
with you. I mean it , but He seems to
have ceased to be with me altogether.
Good-bye, dearest. I kiss your heart
with writing for the last time, and your
eyes, that will see nothing more from me
after this. Good-bye.
Note. — All the letters which follow were found
lying loosely together. They only went to their
destination after the writer's death.
248 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER LX
To-day, dearest, a letter from you
reached me : a fallen star which had
lost its way. It lies dead in my bosom.
It was the letter that lost itself in the
post while I was travelling: it comes
now with half a dozen postmarks, and
signs of long waiting in one place. In
it you say, ' We have been engaged now
for two whole months ; I never dreamed
that two moons could contain so much
happiness.' Nor I, dearest! We have
now been separated for three ; and till
now I had not dreamed that time could so
creep, to such infinitely small purpose, as
it has in carrying me from the moment
when I last saw you.
You were so dear to me. Beloved;
that you ever are ! Time changes
nothing in you as you seemed to me
then. Oh, I am sick to touch your
LOVE-LETTERS 249
hands : all my thoughts run to your
service : they seem to hear you call, only
to find locked doors.
If you could see me now 1 think you
would open the door for a little while.
If they came and told me—' You are
to see him just for five minutes, and then
part again ' — -what should I be wanting
most to say to you? Nothing — only
' speak, speak ! ' I would have you fill
my heart with your voice the whole
time : five minutes more of you to fold
my life round. It would matter very
little what you said, barring the one
thing that remains never to be said.
Oh, could all this silence teach me the
one thing I am longing to know ! — why
am I unworthy of you ? If I cannot be
your wife, why cannot I see you still, —
serve you if possible ? I would be
grateful.
You meant to be generous ; and
wishing not to wound me, you said
that 'there was no fault' in me. I
reahse now that you would not have
said that to the woman }'ou still loved.
And now I am never to know what part
in me is hateful to you. I must live
250 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
with it because you would not tell me
the truth !
Every day tells me I am different
from the thing I wish to be — your love,
the woman you approve.
I love you, I love you I Can I get no
nearer to you ever for all this strain-
ing? If I love you so much, I must be
moving toAvard what you would have
me be. In our happiest days my heart
had its growing pains, — growing to be
as you wished it.
Dear, even the wisest make mistakes,
and the tenderest may be hard without
knowing : I do not think I am unworthy
of you, if you knew all.
Writing to you now seems weakness :
yet it seemed peace to come in here and
cry to you. And when I go about I have
still strength left, and try to be cheer-
ful. Nobody knows, I think nobody
knows. No one in the house is made
downcast because of me. How dear
they are, and how little I can thank
them ! Except to you, dearest, I have
not shown myself selfish.
I love you too much, too much : I
cannot write it.
LOVE-LETTERS 251
LETTER LXI
You are very ill, they tell me. Beloved,
it is such kindness in them to have re-
gard for the wish they disapprove and to
let me know. Knowledge is the one
thing needful whose lack has deprived
me of my happiness : the express image
of sorrow is not so terrible as the fore-
boding doubt of it. Not because you
are ill, but because I know something
definitely about you, I am happier to-day :
a little nearer to a semblance of service
to you in my helplessness. How much
I wish you well, even though that might
again carry you out of my knowledge !
And, though death might bring you
nearer than life now makes possible, I
pray to you, dearest, not to die. It is
not right that you should die yet, with
a mistake in your heart which a little
more life might clear away.
252 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
Praying for your dear eyes to remain
open, I realise suddenly how much hope
still remains in me, where I thought
none was left. Even your illness I take
as a good omen ; and the thought of
you weak as a child and somewhat like
one in your present state with no brain
for deep thinking, comes to my heart to
be cherished endlessly : there you lie,
Beloved, brought home to my imagina-
tion as never since the day v/e parted.
And the thought comes to the rescue of
my helpless longing — that it is as little
children that men get brought into the
kinsfdom of Heaven. Let that be the
medicine and outcome of your sickness,
my own Beloved ! I hold my breath with
liope that I shall have word of you when
your hand has strength again to write.
For I know that in sleepless nights and
in pain you will be unable not to think
of me. If you made resolutions against
that when you were well, they will go
now that you are laid weak ; and so
some power will come back to me, and
my heart will never be asleep for tliink-
ing that yours lies awake wanting it : —
nor ever be at rest for devising ways by
LOVE-LETTERS 253
which to be at the service of your
conscious longing.
Ah, my own one Beloved, whom I have
loved so openly and so secretly, if you
were as I think some other men are.
I could believe that I had given you so
much of my love that you had tired of
me because I had made no favour of it
but had let you see that I was your
faithful subject and servant till death :
so that after twenty years you, chancing
upon an empty day in your life, might
come back and find me still yours ; — as
to-morrow, if you came, you would.
INIy pride died when I saw love look-
ing out of your eyes at me ; and it has
not come back to me now that I see you
no more. I have no ^vish that it should.
In all ways possible I would wish to be
as I was when you loved me ; and seek
to change nothing except as you bid me.
254 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER LXII
So I have seen you, Beloved, again,
after fearing that I never should. A
day's absence from home has given me
this great fortune.
The pain of it was less than it might
have been, since our looks did not meet.
To have seen your eyes shut out their
recognition of me would have hurt me
too much : I must have cried out against
such a judgment. But you passed
by the window without knowing, your
face not raised : so little changed, yet
you have been ill. Arthur tells me
everything : he knows I must have any
word of you that goes begging.
Oh, I hope you are altogether better,
happier ! An illness helps some people :
the worst of their sorrow goes with the
health that breaks down under it; and
they come out purged into a clearer
LOVE-LETTERS 255
air, and are made whole for a fresh trial
of life.
I hear that you are going quite away ;
and my eyes bless this chance to have
embraced you once again. Your face
is the kindest I have ever seen : even
your silence, while I looked at you,
seemed a grace instead of a cruelty.
What kindness, I say to myself, even
if it be mistaken kindness, must have
sealed those dear lips not to tell me of
my unworth !
Oh, if I could see once into the brain
of it all I No one but myself knows
how good you are : how can I, then, be
so unworthy of you ? Did you think I
would not surrender to anything you
fixed, that you severed us so completely,
not even allowing us to meet, and giving
me no way to come back to you though
I might come to be all that you wished ?
Ah, dear face, how hungry you have
made me ! — the more that I think you
are not yet so happy as I could wish, —
as I could make you, — I say it fool-
ishly : — yet if you would trust me, I
am sure.
Oh, how tired loving you now makes
256 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
me ! physically I grow weary with the
ache to have you in my arms ! And
I dream, I dream always, the shadows of
former kindness that never grow warm
enough to clasp me before I wake. —
Yours, dearest, waking or sleeping.
LOVE-LETTERS
LETTER LXIII
Do you remember. Beloved, when you
came on your birthday, you said T was
to give you another birthday present of
your own choosing, and I promised f
And It was that we were to do for the
whole day what / wished : you were not
to be asked to choose.
You said then that it was the first time
I had ever let you have your wav, which
was to see me be myself independently
of you :— as if such a self existed.
You will never see what I write now;
and I did not do then any of the things
I most wished : for first I wished to kneel
down and kiss your hands and feet; and
you would not have liked that. Even
now that you love me no more, you
would not like me to do such a thincr
A woman can never do as she likes whe'n
she loves— there is no such thing until
'to
R
258 AN ENGLISHWOMAN S
he shows it her or she divines it. I loved
you, I loved you ! — that was all I could
do, and all I wanted to do.
You have kept my letters ? Do you
read them ever, I wonder? and do they
tell you differently about me, now that
you see me with new eyes ? Ah no, you
dare not look at them : they tell too much
truth ! How can love-letters ever cease
to be the winged things they were when
they first came ? I fancy mine sick to
death for want of your heart to rest on ;
but never less loving.
If you would read them again, you
would come back to me. Those little
throats of happiness would be too strong
for you. And so you lay them in a cruel
grave of lavender, — ' Lavender for for-
getfulness ' might be another song for
Ophelia to sing.
I am weak with writing to you, I
have written too long : this is twice
to-day.
I do not write to make myself more
miserable : only to fill up my time.
When I go about something definite, I
can do it : — -to ride, or read aloud to the
old people, or sit down at meals with
LOVE-LETTERS 259
them is very easy; but I cannot jnnke
employment for myself— that requires too
much effort of invention and will : and I
have only will for one thing in life — to
get through it : and no invention to the
purpose. Oh, Beloved, in the grave 1
shall lie for ever with a lock of your hair
in my hand. I wonder if, beyond there,
one sees anything ? JNIy eyes ache to-day
from the brain, which is always at blind
groping for you, and the point where T
missed you.
2(50 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER LXIV
Dearest, — It is dreadful to own that 1
was glad at first to know that you and
your mother were no longer together,
glad of something that must mean pain
to you I I am not now. When you
were ill I did a wrong thing : from her
something came to me which I returned.
I would do much to undo that act now ;
but this has fixed it for ever. Witli
it were a few kind words. I could
not bear to accept praise from her :
all went back to her ! Oh, poor thing;
poor thing ! if I ever had an enemy
I thought it was she ! I do not think
so now. Those who seem cold seldom
are. I hope you were with her at
the last : she loved you beyond any
word that was in lier nature to utter,
and the young are hard on the old
LOVE-LETTERS 2C1
without knowing it. We were two
people, she and I, whose love clashed
iealously over the same object, and
we both failed. She is the first to get
rest.
2(32 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER LXV
My Dear, — I dream of you now every
night, and you are always kind, always
just as I knew you : the same without a
shadow of change.
I cannot picture you anyhow else,
though my life is full of the silence you
have made. My heart seems to have
stopped on the last beat the sight of
your handwriting gave it.
I dare not bid you come back now :
sorrow has made me a stranger to my-
self. I could not look at you and say ' I
am your Star ' : — I could not believe it
if I said it. Two women have inhabited
me, and the one here now is not the one
you knew and loved : their one likeness is
that they both have loved the same man,
the one certain that her love was returned,
and the other certain of nothing. What
a world of difference lies in that 1
LOVE-LET'1'EHS 265
I lay hands on myself, half doiibtinfT,
and feel my skeleton pushing to the
front : my glass shows it me. Thus we
are all built up : bones are at the founda-
tions of our happiness, and when the
happiness wears thin, they show through,
the true architecture of humanity.
I have to realise now that I have
become the greatest possible failure in
life, — a woman who has lost her 'share
of the world': I try to shape myself
to it.
It is deadly when a woman's sex, what
was once her glory, reveals itself to her
as an all-containing loss. 1 realised my-
self fully only when I was witli you ; and
now I can't undo it. — You gone, I lean
against a shadow, and feel myself for ever
falling, drifting to no end, a Francesca
without a Paolo. Well, it must be some
comfort that I do not drag you with me.
I never believed myself a 'strong' woman;
your lightest wish shaped me to its liking.
Now you have moulded me with your
own image and superscription, and have
cast me away.
Are not the die and the coin that comes
from it only two sides of the same form ?
264 AN ENGLISHWOMAVS
— there is not a hairsbreadth anywhere
between their surfaces where they lie,
the one enchasing the other. Yet part
them, and the Ught strikes on them how
differently ! That is a mere condition of
light : join them in darkness, where the
light cannot strike, and they are the
same — two faces of a single form. So
you and I, dear, when we are dead, shall
come together again, I trust. Or are we
to come back to each other defaced and
warped out of our true conjunction ?
I think not : for if you have changed, if
soul can ever change, I shall be melted
again by your touch, and flow to meet
all the change that is in you, since my
true self is to be you.
Oh, you, my Beloved, do you wake
happy, either with or without thoughts
of me ? I cannot understand, but I
trust that it may be so. If I could have
a reason why I have so passed out of
your life, I could endure it better. What
was in me that you did not wish ? What
was in you that I must not wish for ever-
more ? If the root of this separation was
in you, if in God's will it was ordered
that we were to love, and, without loving
LOVK-LETTERS 265
less, afterwards be parted, I could
acquiesce so willingly. But it is this
knowinf:^ nothing that overwhelms me :
— I strain my eyes for sight and can't
see ; I reach out my hands for the sun-
light and am given great handfuls of
darkness. I said to you the sun had
dropped out of my heavens. — My dear,
my dear, is this darkness indeed you ?
Am I in the mould with my face to
yours, receiving the close impression of
a misery in which we are at one ? Are
you, dearest, hungering and thirsting for
me, as I now for you ?
1 wonder what, to the starving and
drought-stricken, the taste of death can
be like ! Do all the rivers of the world
run together to the lips then, and all its
fruits strike suddenly to the taste when
the long deprivation ceases to be a want ?
Or is it simply a ceasing of hunger and
thirst — an antidote to it all ?
I mav know soon. How verv strantje
if at the last I forget to think of you I
266 x\N ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER LXVI
Dearest, — Every day I am giving myself
a little more pain than I need — for the
sake of you. I am giving myself your
letters to read again day by day as I
received them. Only one a day, so that
I have still something left to look forward
to to-morrow : and oh, dearest, what un-
answerable things they have now become,
those letters which I used to answer so
easily I There is hardly a word but the
light of to-day stands before it like a
drawn sword, betv/een the heart that
then felt and wrote so, and mine as it
now feels and waits.
All your tenderness then seems to be
cruelty now: only seems, dearest, for I
still say, I do say that it is not so. I
know it is not so : I, who know nothing
else, know that ! So I look every day ,
at one of these monstrous contradictions,
LOVE-LElTEllS 267
and press it to my heart till it becomes
reconciled with the pain that is there
always.
Indeed you loved me : that I see
now. Words which I took so much
for granted then have a strange force
now that I look back at them. You
did love : and I who did not realise it
enough then, realise it now when you
no longer do.
And the commentary on all this is that
one letter of yours which I say over and
over to myself sometimes when I cannot
pray : ' There is no fault in you : the fault
is elsewhere ; I can no longer love you
as I did. All that was between us must
be at an end ; for your good and mine the
only right thing is to say good-bye with-
out meeting. I know you will not forget
me, but you will forgive me, even because
of the great pain I cause you. You are the
most generous woman I have known. If
it would comfort you to blame me for this
I would beg you to do it : but I know you
better, and ask you to beUeve that it is my
deep misfortune rather than my fault that
I can be no longer your lover, as, God
knows, I was once, I dare not say how
268 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
short a time ago. To me you remain,
what I always found you, the best and
most true-hearted woman a man could
pray to meet.'
This, dearest, I say and say : and write
down now lest you have forgotten it.
For your writing of it, and all the rest
of you that I have, goes with me to
my grave. How superstitious we are
of our own bodies after death! — I, as
if I believed that I should ever rise or
open my ears to any sound again ! I
do not, yet it comforts me to make sure
that certain things shall go with me to
dissolution.
Truly, dearest, I believe grief is a great
deceiver, and that no one quite quite
wishes not to exist. 1 have no belief in
future existence ; yet I wish it so much
— to exist again outside all this failure
of my life. For at present I have done
you no good at all, only evil.
And I hope now and then, that writing
thus to you I am not writing altogether
in vain. If I can see sufficiently at the
last to say — Send him these, it will be
almost like living again : for surely you
will love me again when you see how
LOVE-LETTERS 269
much I have suffered, — and suffered
because I would not let thought of you
go.
Could you dream, Beloved, reading this,
that there is bright sunlight streaming
over my paper as I write ?
270 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER LXVII
Do you forgive me for coming into your
life, Beloved ? I do not know in what
way I can have hurt you, but I know
that I have. Perhaps without knowing
it we exchange salves for the wounds we
have given and received ? Dearest, I
trust those I send reach you : I send
them, wishing till I grow weak. My
arms strain and become tired trying to
be wings to carry them to you : and I
am glad of that weariness — it seems to
be some virtue that has gone out of me.
If all my body could go out in the effort,
I think I should get a glimpse of your
face, and the meaning of everything then
at last.
1 have brought in a wild rose to lay
here in love's cenotaph, among all my
thoughts of you. It comes from a grave-
yard full of ' little deaths.' I remember
LOVE-LETTERS 27]
once sending you a flower from the same
place when love was still fortunate with
us. I must have been reckless in my
happiness to do that !
Beloved, if I could speak or write out
all my thoughts, till I had emptied my-
self of them, I feel that I should rest.
But there is no emptying the brain by
thinking. Things thought come to be
thought again over and over, and more
and fresh come in their train : children
and grandchildren, generations of them,
sprung from the old stock. I have many
thoughts now, born of my love for you,
that never came when we were together,
— grandchildren of our days of courtship.
Some of them are set down here, but
others escape and will never see your
face !
If (poor word, it has the sound but
no hope of a future life) : still, if you
should ever come back to me and want,
as you would want, to know something
of the life in between, — 1 could put these
letters that I keep into your hands and
trust them to say for me that no day
have I been truly, that is to say tr?7/-
ingly, out of your heart When Bichard
272 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
Feverel comes back to his wife, do you
remember how she takes him to see their
child, which till then he had never seen
— and its likeness to him as it lies asleep ?
Dearest, have 1 not been as true to you
in all that I leave here written ?
If, when I come to my finish, I get
any truer glimpse of your mind, and am
sure of what you would wish, I will leave
word that these shall be sent to you. If
not, I must suppose knowledge is still
delayed, not that it will not reach you.
Sometimes I try still not to wish to
die. For my poor body's sake I wish
Well to have its last chance of coming
to pass. It is the unhappy unfulfilled
clay of life, I think, which robbed of its
share of things set ghosts to walk : mists
which rise out of a ground that has not
worked out its fruitfulness, to take the
shape of old desires. If I leave a ghost,
it will take your shape, not mine, dearest :
for it will be ' as trees walking ' that the
' lovers of trees ' will come back to earth.
Browning did not know that. Some one
else, not Browning, has worded it for
us : a lover of trees far away sends his
soul back to the country that has lost
LOVE-LETTERS 273
him, and there ' the traveller, marvelling
why, halts on the bridge to hearken how
soft the poplars sigh,' not knowing that
it is the lover himself who sighs in the
trees all night. That is how the ghosts of
real love come back into the world. The
ghosts of love and the ghosts of hatred
must be quite different : these bring fear,
and those none. Come to me, dearest,
in the blackest night, and I will not be
afraid.
How strange that when one has suffered
most, it is the poets (those who are sup-
posed to sijig) who best express things for
us. Yet singing is the thing I feel least
like. If ever a heart once woke up to
find itself full of tune, it was mine; now
you have drawn all the song out of it,
emptied it dry : and I go to the poets to
read epitaphs. I think it is their cruelty
that appeals to me : — they can sing of
grief ! O hard hearts !
Sitting here thinking of you, my ears
have suddenly become wide open to the
night-sounds outside. A night-jar is
making its beautiful burr in the stillness,
and there are things going away and
away, telling me the whereabouts of life
s
271 AN ENGLTSHAVOMAN'S
like points on a map made for the ear.
You, too, are somexvhere outside, making
no sound : and listening for you I heard
these. It seemed as if my brain had all
at once opened and caught a new sense.
Are you there ? This is one of those
things which drop to us with no present
meaning : yet I know I am not to forget
it as long as I live.
Good night ! At your head, at your
feet, is there any room for me to-night,
Beloved ?
LOVE-LETTERS 275
LETTER LXVIII
Dearest, — The thought keeps troub-
ling me how to give myself to you most,
if you should ever come back for me
when I am no longer here. These poor
letters are all that I can leave : will they
tell you enough of my heart ?
Oh, into that, wish any wish that you
like, and it is there already ! My heart,
dearest, only moves in the wish to be
M'hat you desire.
Yet I am conscious that I cannot give,
unless you shall choose to take : and
though 1 write myself down each day
your willing slave, I cry my wares in
a market where there is no bidder to
hear me.
Dearest, though my whole life is yours,
it is little you know of it. My wish would
be to have every year of my life blessed
by your consciousness of it. Barely a
276 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
year of me is all that you have, truly, to
remember : though I think five summers
at least came to flower, and withered in
that one.
I wish you knew my whole life : I
cannot tell it : it was too full of infinitely
small things. Yet what I can remember
I would like to tell now : so that some
day, perhaps, perhaps, my childhood may
here and there be warmed long after its
death by your knowledge coming to it
and discovering in it more than you
knew before.
How I long, dearest, that what I write
m.ay look up some day and meet your
eye ! Beloved, then, however faded the
ink may have grown, I think the spirit
of my love will remain fresh in it:— I
kiss you on the lips with every word.
The thought of ' good-bye ' is never to
enter here : it is ^ reviderci for ever and
ever : — ' Love, love,' and ' meet again ! '
— the words we put into the thrush's
song on a day you will remember, when
all the world for us was a garden.
Dearest, what I can tell you of older
days, — little things they must be — I will:
and I know that if you ever come to
LOVE-LETTERS 277
value them at all, their littleness will
make them doubly welcome : — ^just as to
know that you were once called a ' gall-
ons young hound ' by people whom you
plagued when a boy, was to me a darling
discovery: all at once I caught my child-
hood's imaginary comrade to my young
spirit's heart and kissed him, brow and
eyes.
Good night, good night ! To-morrow
I will find you some earliest memory:
the dew of Hermon be on it when you
come to it — if ever !
Oh, Beloved, could you see into my
heart now, or I into yours, time would
grow to nothing for us ; and my child-
hood would stay unwritten !
From far and near I gather my thoughts
of you for the kiss I cannot give. Good
night, dearest.
278 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER LXIX
Beloved, — I remember my second birth-
day. I am quite sure of it, because my
third I remember so infinitely well. —
Then I was taken in to see Arthur lying
in baby bridal array of lace fringes and
gauze, and received in my arms held up
for me by Nan-nan the awful weight and
imperial importance of his small body.
I think from the first I was told of
him as my ' brother ' : cousin 1 have
never been able to think him. But all
this belongs to my third : on my second,
I remember being on a floor of roses ;
and they told me if I would go across to
a cupboard and pull it open there would
be something there waiting for me.
And it was. on all-fours that I went all
eagerness across great patches of rose-
pattern, till I had butted my way through
a door left ajar, and found in a cardboard
LOVE-LETTERS 279
box of bright tinsel and flowers two little
wax babes in the wood lying.
I think they gave me my first sense of
colour, except, perhaps, the rose- carpet
which came earlier, and they remained
for quite a long time the most beautiful
thing I knew. It is strange that I can-
not remember what became of them, for
I am sure I neither broke nor lost them,
— perhaps it was done for me : Arthur
came afterwards, the tomb of many of
my early joys, and the maker of so many
new ones. He, dearest, is the one, the
only one, who has seen the tears that
belong truly to you : and he blesses me
with such wonderful patience when I
speak your name, allowing that perhaps
I know better than he. And after the
wax babies I had him for my third birth-
day.
280 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER LXX
Beloved, — I think that small children
see very much as animals must do : just
the parts of things which have a direct
influence on their lives, and no memory
outside that. I remember the kindness
or frowns of faces in early days far more
than the faces themselves : and it is quite
a distinct and later memory that T have of
standing within a doorway and watching
my mother pass downstairs unconscious
of my being there, — and then, for the first
time, studying her features and seeing
in them a certain solitude and distance
which I had never before noticed : — I
suppose because I had never before
thought of looking at her when she was
not concerned with me.
It was this unobservance of actual
features, I imagine, which made me think
all grey-haired people alike, and find a
LOVE-LETTERS 281
difficulty in recognising those who called,
except generically as callers — people who
kissed me, and whom therefore I liked
to see.
One, I remember, for no reason un-
less because she had a brown face, I
mistook from a distance for my Aunt
Dolly, and bounded into the room where
she was sitting, with a cry of rapture.
And it was my earliest conscious test
of politeness, when I found out my mis-
take, not to cry over it in the kind but
very inferior presence to that one I had
hoped for.
I suppose, also, that many sights which
have no meaning to children go, happily,
quite out of memory ; and that what our
early years leave for us in the mind's
lavender are just the tit-bits of life, or
the first blows to our intelligence — things
which did matter and mean much.
Corduroys come early into my life, —
their colour and the queer earthy smell
of those which particularly concerned
me : because I was picked up from a
fall and tenderly handled by a rough
working-man so clothed, whom 1 re-
garded for a long time afterwards as an
2852 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
adorable object. He and I lived to my
recognition of him as a wizened, scrubby,
middle-aged man, but remained good
friends after the romance was over. I
don't know when the change in my
sense of beauty took place as regards
him.
Anything unusual that appealed to
my senses left exaggerated marks. My
father once in full uniform appeared to
me as a giant, so that I screamed and
ran, and required much of his kindest
voice to coax me back to him.
Also once in the street a dancer in
fancy costume struck me in the same
way, and seemed in his red tunic twice
the size of the people who crowded
round him.
I think as a child the small ground-
flowers of spring took a larger hold upon
me than any others : — I was so close to
them. Roses I don't remember till I
was four or live ; but crocus and snow-
drop seem to have been in my blood
from the very beginning of things ; and
I remember likening the green inner
petals of the snowdrop to the skirts of
some ballet- dancinir dolls, which danced
LOVE-LETTERS 283
themselves out of sight before I was four
years old.
Snapdragons, too, I remember as if
with my first summer : I used to feed
them with bits of their own green leaves,
believing faithfully that those mouths
must need food of some sort. When
I became more thoughtful I ceased to
make cannibals of them : but I think
1 was less convinced then of the diges-
tive process. 1 don't know when I left
off feeding snapdragons; I think calceo-
larias helped to break me off the habit,
for I found they had no throats to
swallow with.
In much the same way as sights that
have no meaning leave no traces, so I
suppose do words and sounds. It was
many years before I overheard, in the
sense of taking in, a conversation by
elders not meant for me : though once,
in my innocence, I hid under the table
during the elders' late dinner, and came
out at dessert, to which we were always
allowed to come down, hoping to be an
amusing surprise to them. And I could
not at all understand why I was scolded;
for, indeed, I had heard nothing at all.
284 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
though no doubt plenty that was un-
suitable for a child's ears had been said,
and was on the elders' minds when they
upbraided me.
Dearest, such a long-ago ! and all these
smallest of small things I remember
again, to lay them up for you : all the
child-parentage of me whom you loved
once, and will again if ever these come
to you.
Bless my childhood, dearest : it did
not know it was lonely of you, as I
know of myself now ! And yet I have
known you, and know you still, so am
the more blest. — Good night.
LOVE-LETTERS 285
LETTER LXXI
I USED to stand at the foot of the stairs
a long tuTie, when by myself, before
daring to start up : and then it was
always the right foot that went first.
And a fearful feeling used to accompany
me that I was going to meet the 'evil
chance ' when I got to the corner. Some-
times when I felt it was there very badly,
I used at the last moment to shut my
eyes and walk through it : and feel, on
the other side, like a pilgrim who had
come through the waters of Jordan.
My eyes were always the timidest
things about me : and to shut my eyes
tight against the dark was the only way
I had of meeting the solitude of the
first hour of bed when Nan-nan had
left me, and before I could get to sleep.
I have an idea that one listens better
with one's eyes shut, and that this and
286 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
other things are a remnant of our primi-
tive existence when perhaps tlie ears of
our arboreal ancestors kept a look-out
while the rest of their senses slept. I
think, also, that the instinct I found in
myself, and have since in other children,
to conceal a wound is a similar survival.
At one time, I suppose, in the human
herd the damaged were quickly put out
of existence ; and it was the self-preser-
vation instinct which gave me so keen
a wish to get into hiding when one day
I cut my finger badly — something more
than a mere scratch, which I would
have cried over and had bandaged quite
in the correct way. I remember I sat
in a corner and pretended to be nursing
a raff doll which I had knotted round
my hand, till Nan-nan noticed, perhaps,
that I looked white, and found blood
flowing into my lap. And I can recall
still the overcoming comfort which fell
upon me as I let resolution go, and
sobbed in her arms full of pity for my-
self and scolding the ' naughty knife '
that had done the deed. The rest of
that day is lost to me.
Yet it is not only occasions of happi-
LOVE-LETTERS 287
ness and pain which impress themselves.
When the mind takes a sudden stride
in consciousness, — that, also, hxes itself.
I remember the agony of shyness which
came on me when strange hands did my
undressing for me once in Nan-nan's
absence : — the first time I had felt such
a thing. And another day I remember,
after contemplating the head of Judas
in a pictorial puzzle for a long time, that
I seized a brick and pounded him with
it beyond recognition : — these were the
first vengeful beginnings of Christianity
in me. All my history, Bible and Eng-
lish, came to me through picture-books.
I Avept tenderly over the endangered
eyes of Prince Arthur, yet I put out
the eyes of many kings, princes, and
governors who incurred my displeasure,
scratching them with pins till only a
white blur remained on the paper.
All this comes to me quite seriously
now : I used to laugh thinking it over.
But can a single thing we do be called
trivial, since out of it we grow up minute
by minute into a whole being charged
with capacity for gladness or suffering ?
Now, as I look back, all these atoms
288 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
of memory are dust and ashes that T
have walked tliroiifrh in order to get to
present things. How I suffer, how I
suffer! If you could have dreamed that
a human body could contain so much
suffering, I think you would have chosen
a less dreadful way of showing me your
will : you would have given me a reason
why I have to suffer so.
Dearest, I am broken off every habit
T ever had, except my love of you. If
you would come back to me you could
shape me into whatever you wished. I
will be different in all but just that
one thing.
LOVE-LETTERS 289
LETTER LXXTT
Here in my pain. Beloved, I remember
keenly now the one or two occasions
when as a small child 1 was consciously
a cause of pain to others. What an
irony of life that once of the two times
when I remember to have been cruel, it
was to Arthur, with his small astonished
baby-face remaining a reproach to me
ever after ! I was hardly five then, and
going up to the nursery from down-
stairs had my supper-cake in my hand,
only a few mouthfuls left. He had
been having his bath, and was sitting
up on Nan-nan's knee being got into
his bedclothes ; when spying me with
my cake he piped to have a share of it.
I daresay it would not have been good
for him, but of that I thought nothing
at all : the cruel impulse took me to
make one mouthful of all that was left.
T
290 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
He watched it go without crying ; but
his eyes opened at me in a strange way,
wondering at this sudden lesson of the
hardness of a human heart. ' All gone ! '
was what he said, turning his head from
me up to Nan-nan, to see perhaps if
she too had a like surprise for his wee
intelligence. I think 1 have never for-
given myself that, though Arthur has
no memory of it left in him : the judging
remembrance of it would, I believe, win
forgiveness to him for any wrong he
might now do me, if that and not the
contrary were his way with me : so
unreasonably is my brain scarred where
the thought of it still lies. God may
forgive us our trespasses by marvellous
slow ways ; but we cannot always forgive
them ourselves.
The other thing came out of a less
personal greed, and was years later :
Arthur and I were collecting eggs, and
in the loft over one of the out-houses
there was a swallow's nest too high up
to be reached by any ladder we could
get up there. I was intent on getting
the eggs, and thought of no other thing
that might chance : so I spread a soft
LOVE-LETTERS «91
fall below, and with a long pole I broke
the floor of the nest. Then with a
sudden stir of horror I saw soft things
falling along with the clay, tiny and
feathery. Two were killed by the break-
age that fell with them, but one was
quite alive and unhurt. I gathered up
the remnants of the nest and set it with
the young one in it by the loft- window
where the parent-birds might see, making
clumsy strivings of pity to quiet my con-
science. The parent-birds did see, soon
enough : they returned, first up to the
rafters, then darting round and round
and crying ; then to where their little
one lay helpless and exposed, hung over
it with a nibbling movement of their
beaks for a moment, making my miser-
able heart bound up with hope : then
away, away, shrieking into the July-
sunshine. Once they came back, and
shrieked at the horror of it all, and fled
away not to return.
I remained for hours and did whatever
silly pity could dictate : but of course the
young one died : and I — cleared away
all remains that nGbody might see ! And
that I gave up egg-collecting after that
292 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
was no penance, but choice. Since then
the poignancy of my regret when I think
of it has never softened. The question
which pride of life and love of make-
believe till then had not raised in me,
' Am I a god to kill and to make alive ? '
was answered all at once by an emphatic
' No,' which I never afterwards forgot.
But the grief remained all the same,
that life, to teach me that blunt truth,
should have had to make sacrifice in the
mote-hung loft of three frail lives on a
clay-altar, and bring to nothing but pain
and a last miserable dart away into the
bright sunshine the spring work of two
swift-winged intelligences. Is man, we are
told to think, not worth many sparrows ?
Oh, Beloved, sometimes I doubt it ! and
would in thought give my life that those
swallows in their generations might live
again.
Beloved, I am letting what I have tried
to tell you of my childhood end in a sad
way. For it is no use, no use : I have
not to-day a glimmer of hope left that
your eyes will ever rest on what I have
been at such deep trouble to write.
If I were being punished for these
LOVE-LEITERS 293
two childish things I did, I should see
a side of justice in it all. But it is for
loving you I am being punished : and
not God himself shall make me let you
go I Beloved, Beloved, all my days are
at your feet, and among them days when
you held me to your heart. Good night ;
good night always now 1
294) AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER LXXIII
Dearest, — I could never have made
any appeal from you to anybody : all
my appeal has been to you alone. I
have wished to hear reason from no
other lips but yours ; and liad you but
really and deeply confided in me, I
believe I could have submitted almost
with a light heart to what you thought
best: — though in no way and by no
stretch of the imagination can I see you
coming to me for the last time and say-
iJig, as you only wrote, that it was best
we should never see each other again.
You could not have said that with
any sound of truth ; and how can it look
truer frozen into writing ? I have kissed
the words, because you wrote them ; not
believing them. It is a suspense of
unbelief that you have left me in, oh,
still dearest ! Yet never was sad heart
LOVE-LETTERS 295
truer to the fountain of all its joy than
mine to yours. You had only to see me
to know that.
Some day, I dream, we shall come
suddenly together, and you will see,
before a word, before I have time to
gather my mind back to the bodily
comfort of your presence, a face filled
with thoughts of you that have never
left it, and never been bitter : — I believe
never once bitter. For even when I
think, and convince myself that you have
wronged yourself — and so, me also, —
even then : oh, then most of all, my
heart seems to break with tenderness,
and my spirit grow more famished than
ever for the w^ant of you ! For if you
have done right, wisely, then you have
no longer any need of me : but if you
have done wrong, then you must need
me. Oh, dear heart, let that need over-
whelm you like a sea, and bring you
towards me on its strong tide ! And
come when you will I shall be waiting.
296 AN ENGLISH VVOMANS
LETTER LXXIV
Dearest and dearest, — So long as you
are still this to mv lieart I trust to have
strength to write it ; though it is but a
ghost of old happiness that comes to
me in the act. I have no hope now left
in me : but I love you not less, only
more, if that be possible : or is it the
same love with just a weaker body to
contain it all ? I find that to have
definitely laid off all hope gives me a
certain relief : for now that I am so
hopeless it becomes less hard not to
misjudge you — not to say and think
impatiently about you things which
would explain why I had to die like
this.
Dearest, nothing but love shall explain
anything of you to me. When I think
of your dear face, it is only love that can
give it its meaning. If love would teach
LOVE-LE^rTERS 297
me the meaning oi this silence, I would
accept all the rest, and not ask for any
joy in life besides. For if I had the
meaning, however dark, it would be by
love speaking to me again at last ; and
I should have your hand holding mine in
the darkness for ever.
Your face, Beloved, I can remember
so well that it would be enough if I had
your hand. — the meaning, just the
meaning, why I have to sit blind.
298 AN ENGLISHWOMAN S
LETTER LXXV
Dearest, — There is always one possi-
bility which I try to remember in all I
write : even where there is no hope a
thing remains possible : — that your eye
may some day come to rest upon what
I leave here. And I would have nothing
so dark as to make it seem that I were
better dead than to have come to such a
pass through loving you. If I felt that,
dearest, I should not be writing my heart
out to you, as I do : when I cease doing
that I shall indeed have become dead
and not want you any more, I sup-
pose. How far I am from dying, then,
now!
So be quite sure that if now, even
now, — for to-day of all days has seemed
most dark — if now I were given my
choice — to have known you or not to
have known you, — Beloved, a thousand
LOVE-LETTERS 299
times I would claim to keep what 1
have, rather than have it taken away
from me. I cannot forget that for a few
months I was the happiest woman I ever
knew : and that happiness is perhaps
only by present conditions removed from
me. If I have a soul, I beheve good
will come back to it; because I have
done nothing to deserve this darkness
unless by loving you : and if by lov-
ing you, I am glad that the darkness
came.
Beloved, you have the yes and no to
all this : / have not, and cannot have.
Something that you have not chosen for
me to know, you know: it should be a
burden on your conscience, surely, not
to have shared it with me. Maybe there
is something I know that you do not.
In the way of sorrow, I think and wish
— yes. In the way of love, I wish to
think — no.
Any more thinking wearies me. Per-
haps we have loved too much, and have
lost our way out of our poor five senses,
without having strength to take over the
new world which is waiting beyond them.
Well, T would rather. Beloved, suffer
300 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
through lovnig too much, than through
loving too Uttle. It is a good fault as
faults go. And it is my fault, Beloved :
so some day you may have to be tender
to it
LOVE-LETTERS 301
LETTER LXXVI
Dearest, — I feel constantly that we are
together still . I cannot explain. When
I am most miserable, even so that I feel
a longing to fly out of reach of the dear
household voices which say shy things
to keep me cheerful, — I feel that I have
you in here waiting for me. Heart's
heart, in my darkest, it is you who speak
to me!
As I write I have my cheek pressed
against yours. None of it is true : not a
word, not a day that has separated us !
I am yours : it is only the poor five
senses part of us that spells absence.
Some day, some day you will answer this
letter which has to stay locked in my
desk. Some day, I mean, an answer will
reach me : — without your reading this,
your answer will come. Is not your
heart at this moment answering me ?
302 AM ENGLISHWOMAN'S
Dearest, I trust you : I could not have
dreamed you to myself, therefore you
must be true, quite independently of me.
You as I saw you once with open eyes
remain so for ever. You cannot make
yourself. Beloved, not to be what you
are : you have called my soul to life if
for no other reason than to bear witness
of you, come what may. No length of
silence can make a truth once sounded
ever cease to be : borne away out of our
hearing it makes its way to the stars :
dispersed or removed it cannot be lost.
I too, for truth's sake, may have to be
dispersed out of my present self which
shuts me from you : but I shall find you
some day, — you who made me, you who
every day make me ! A part of you cut
off, I suffer pain because I am still part
of you. If I had no part in you I should
suffer nothing. But I do, I do. One is
told how, when a man has lost a limb,
he still feels it, — not the pleasure of it
but the pain. Dearest, are you aware of
me now ?
Because I am suffering, you shall not
think I am entirely miserable. But here
and novv' I am all unfinished ends.
LOVE-LETTERS 303
Desperately I need faith at times to tell
me that each shoot of pain has a point at
which it assuages itself and becomes heal-
ing : that pain is not endurance wasted ;
but that I and my weary body have a
goal which will give a meaning to all
this, somehow, somewhere : — never, I
begin to fear, here, while this body has
charge of me.
Dearest, I lay my heart down on
yours and cry : and having worn myself
out with it and ended, I kiss your lips
and bless God that I have known you.
I have not said — I never could say it
• — 'Let the day perish wherein Love was
born ! ' I forget nothing of you : you
are clear to me, — all but one thing : why
we have become as we are now, — one
whole, parted and sent different ways.
And yet so near ! On my most sleepless
nights my pillow is yours : I wet your
face with my tears and cry, ' Sleep well."'
To-night also, Beloved, sleep well !
Night and morning I make you my
prayer.
304 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER LXXVII
My own one beloved, my dearest dearl
Want me, please want me ! I will keep
alive for you. Say you wisli me to live,
— not come to you : don't say that if you
can't — but just wish me to hve, and I
will. Yes, I will do anything, even live,
if you tell me to do it. I will be
stronger than all the world or fate, if
you have any wish about me at all.
Wish well, dearest, and surely the know-
ledge will come to me. Wish big things
of me, or little things ; wish me to sleep,
and I will sleep better because of it.
Wish anything of me : only not that T
should love you better. I can't, dearest,
I can't. Any more of that, and love
would go out of my body and leave it
clay. If you would even wish that, 1
would be happy at finding a way to do
your will below ground more perfectly
LOVE-LETTERS S05
than any I found on it. Wish, wish :
only wish something for me to do. Oh,
I could rest if I had but your little finger
to love. The tyranny of love is when it
makes no bidding at all. That you have
no want or wish left in you as regards
me is my continual despair. INIy own.
my beloved, my tormentor and comforter,
my ever dearest dear, whom I love so
muchl
V
1306 AN ENGLISHWOMAN S
LETTER LXXVIII
To-night, Beloved, the burden of things
is too much for me. Come to me some-
how, dear ghost of all my happiness, and
take me in your arms I I ache and ache,
not to belong to you. I do : I must.
It is only our senses that divide us ; and
mine are all famished servants waiting
for their master. They have nothing to
do but watch for you, and pretend that
they believe you will come. Oh, it is
grievous !
Beloved, in the darkness do you feel
my kisses ? They go out of me in sharp
stabs of pain : they nmst go somewhere
for me to be delivered of them only with
so much suffering. Oh, how this sliould
make me hate you, if that were possible :
how, instead, I love you more and more,
and shall, dearest, and will till I die !
I xvill die, because in no other way can
LO\E-I.ETTERS 307
I express how much I love you. I am
possessed by all the despairing words
about lost happiness that the poets have
written. They go through me like
ghosts ; I am haunted by them : but
they are bloodless things. It seems
when I listen to all the other desolate
voices that have ever cried, that I alone
have blood in me. Nobody ever loved
as I love since the world began.
There, dearest, take this, all this bitter
wine of me poured out until I feel in
myself only the dregs left : and still in
them is the fire and the suffering.
No : but I will be better : it is better
to have known you than not. Give me
time, dearest, to get you to heart again !
I cannot leave you like this : not with
such words as these for * good night ! '
Oh, dear face, dear unforgetable lost
face, my soul strains up to look for you
through the blind eyes that have been
left to torment me because they can
never behold you. Very often I have
seen you looking grieved, shutting away
some sorrow in yourself quietly : but
never once angry or impatient at any
of the small follies of men. Come, then,
308 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
and look at me patiently now I T am
your blind girl : I must cry out because
I cannot see you. Only make me be-
lieve that you yet think of me as, when
you so unbelievably separated us, you
said you had always found me — 'the
dearest and most true-hearted woman a
man could pray to meet.' Beloved, if
in your heart I am still that, separation
does not matter. I can wait, I can wait.
I kiss your feet : even to-morrow may
bring the light. God bless you ! I pray
it more than ever ; because to me to-night
has been so very dark.
LOVE-LETTERS 309
LETTER LXXTX
Dearest, — I have not written to you for
three weeks. At last I am better again.
You seem to have been waiting for me
here : always wondering when I would
come back. I do come back, you see.
Dear heart, how are you ? I kiss your
feet ; you are my one only happiness, my
sreat one. Words are too cold and cruel
to write anything for me. Picture me :
I am too weak to write more, but I
have written this, and am so much better
for it.
Reward me some day by reading
what is here. I kiss, because of you,
this paper which I am too tired to fill
any more.
Love, nothing but love ! Into every
one of these dead words my heart has
been beating, trying to lay down its life
and reach to you.
310 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER LXXX
A SECRET, dearest, that will be no secret
soon : before I am done with twenty- three
I shall have passed my age. Beloved, it
hurts me more than I can say that the
news of it should come to you from any
one but me : for this, though I write it, is
already a dead letter, lost like a predestined
soul even in the pains that gave it birth.
Yes, it does pain me, frightens me even,
that I must die all by myself, and feeling
still so young. I thought I should look
forward to it, but I do not ; no, no, I
would give much to put it off for a time,
until I could know what it will mean for
me as regards you. Oh, if you only knew
and cared, what wild comfort I might
have in the knowledge! It seems strange
that if I were going away from the chance
of a perfect life with you I should feel it
with less pain than I feel this. The dust
LOVE-LETTERS Sll
and the ashes of life are all that I have
to let fall : and it is bitterness itself to
part with them.
How we grow to love sorrow I Joy is
never so much a possession — it goes over
us, encloses us like air or sunlight ; but
sorrow goes into us and becomes part of
our flesh and bone. So that I, holding
up my hand to the sunshine, see sorrow
red and transparent like stained glass
between me and the light of day, sorrow
that has become inseparably mine, and is
the very life I am wishing to keep !
Dearest, will the world be more bear-
able to you Avhen I am out of it ? It is
selfish of me not to wish so, since I can
satisfy you in this so soon I Every day
I will try to make it my wish : or wish
that it may be so when the event comes
— not a day before. Till then let it be
more bearable that I am still alive : ffrant
me, dearest, that one little grace while
I live !
Bearable ! My sorrow is bearable, 1
suppose, because I do bear it from day
to day : otherwise I would declare it not
to be. Don't suffer as 1 do, dearest,
unless that will comfort you.
312 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
One thing is strange, but I feel quite
certain of it : when I heard that I carried
death about in me, scarcely an arm's-
length away, I thought quickly to my-
self that it was not the solution of the
mystery. Others might have thought
that it was : that because I was to die
so soon, therefore I was not fit to be
your wife. But I know it was not that.
I know that whatever hopes death in nie
put an end to, you would have married
me and loved me patiently till I released
you, as I am to so soon.
It is always this same woe that crops
up : nothing I can ever think can account
for what has been decreed. That too is
a secret : mine comes to meet it. When
it arrives shall I know ?
And not a word, not a word of this
can reach you ever ! Its uses are wrung
out and drained dry to comfort me in
my eternal solitude.
Good night ; very soon it will have to
be good-bye.
LOVE-LETTERS 313
LETTER LXXXI
Beloved, — I woke last night and believed
I had your arms round me, and that all
storms had gone over me for ever. The
peace of your love had enclosed me so
tremendously that when I was fully
awake I began to think that what 1 held
was you dead, and that our reconcilia-
tion had come at that great cost.
Something remains real of it all, even
now under the full light of day : yet I
know you are not dead. Only it leaves
me with a hope that at the lesser cost
of my own death, when it comes, happi-
ness may break in, and that whichever
of us has been the most in poor and
needy ignorance will know the truth at
last^the truth which is an inseparable
need for all hearts that love rightly.
Even now to me the thought of you
is a peace passing all understanding,
314 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
Beloved, Beloved, Beloved, all the greet-
ings I ever gave you gather here, and are
hungry to belong to you by a better way
than I have ever dreamed. I am yours
till something more than death swallows
me up.
LOVE-LETTERS 315
LETTER L XXXII
Deakest, — If you will believe any word
of mine, you must not believe that I
have died of a broken heart should
science and the doctors bring about a
fulfilment of their present prophesyings
concerning me.
I think my heart has held me up for a
long time, not letting me know that I
was ill : I did not notice. And now my
body snaps on a stem that has grown too
thin to hold up its weight. I am at the
end of twenty-two years : they have been
too many for me, and the last has seemed
a useless waste of time. It is difficult
not to believe that great happiness might
have carried me over many more years
and built up for me in the end a
renewed youth : I asked that quite
frankly, wishing to know, and was told
not to think it.
316 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
So, dearest, whatever comes, whatever
I may have written to fill up my worst
loneliness, be sure, if you care to be, that
though my Ufe was wholly yours, my
death was my own, and comes at its
right natural time. Pity me, but invent
no blame to yourself. My heart has
sung of you even in the darkest days ; in
the face of everything, the blankness of
everything, I mean, it has clung to an
unreasoning belief that in spite of appear-
ances all had some well in it, above all
to a conviction that — perhaps without
knowing it — you still love me. Believ-
ing that, it could not break, could not,
dearest. Any other part of me, but not
that.
Beloved, I kiss your face, I kiss your
lips and eyes : my mind melts into
kisses when I think of you. However
weak the rest of me grows, my love shall
remain strong and certain. If I could
look at you again, how in a moment you
would fill up the past and the future and
turn even my grief into gold I Even
my senses then would forget that they
had ever been starved. Dear ' share of
the world,' you have been out of sight,
LOVE-LETTERS 317
but I have never let you go ! Ah, if
only the whole of me, the double doubt-
ing part of me as well, could only be so
certain as to be able to give wings to
this and let it fly to you ! Wish for it,
and I think the knowledge will come
to rne !
Good night! God brings you to me
in my first dream : but the longing so
keeps me awake that sometimes I am a
Avhule night sleepless.
318 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER LXXXIII
I AM frightened, dearest, I am frightened
at death. Not only for fear it should
take me altogether away from you
instead of to you, but for other reasons
besides, — instincts which I thought gone
but am not rid of even yet. No healthy
body, or body with power of enjoyment
in it, wishes to die, I think : and no heart
with any desire still living out of the
past. We know nothing at all really:
we only think we believe, and hope we
know; and how thin that sort of con-
viction gets when in our extremity we
come face to face with the one immov-
able fact of our own death waiting for
us 1 That is what I have to go through.
Yet even the fear is a relief: I come
upon something that I can meet at last;
a challenge to my courage whether it is
still to be found here in this body I have
lo\;k-i.ettehs sid
worn so weak with useless lamentations.
If I had your hand, or even a word from
you, I think I should not be afraid : but
perhaps I should. It is all one. Good-
bye : I am beginning at last to feel a
meaning in that word which I wrote at
your bidding so long ago. Oh, Beloved,
from face to feet, good-bye ! God be
with you wherever you go and I do not !
320 AN ENGLISHWOMAN'S
LETTER EX XXIV
Dearest. — I am to have news of you.
Arthur came to me last night, and told
me that, if I wished, he would bring me
word of you. He goes to-morrow. He
put out the light that I might not see
his face : I felt what w^as there.
You should know this of him : he has
been the dearest possible of human
beings to me since I lost you. I am.
almost not unblessed when I have him
to speak to. Yet we can say so little
together. I guess all he means. An
endless wish to give me comfort : — and
T stay selfish. The knowledge that he
would stolidly die to serve me hardly
touches me.
Oh, look kindly in his eyes if you see
him : mine will be looking at you out
of his 1
LOVE-LETTERS 321
LETTEK LXXXV
Good-morning, Beloved ; there is sun
shining. I wonder if Arthur is with
you yet ?
If faith could still remove mountains,
surely I should have seen you long ago.
But if I were to see you now, I should
fear that it meant you were dead.
That the same world should hold you
and me living and unseen by each other
is a great mystery. Will love ever
explain it ?
I wish I could bid the sun stand still
over your meeting with Arthur so that
I might know. We were so like each
other once. Time has worn it off:
but he is like what I was. Will you
remember me well enough to recognise
me in him, and to be a little pitiful to
my weak longing for a word this one last
time of all ? Beloved, I press my lips to
yours, and pray — speak !
X
LOVE-LETTERS
LETTER LXXXVI
Dearest, — To-day Arthur came and
brought me your message : I have at my
heart your 'profoundly grateful remem-
brances.' Somewhere else unanswered
lies your prayer for God to bless me. To
answer that, dearest, is not in His hands
but in yours. And the form of your
message tells me it will not be, — not
for this body and spirit that have been
bound together so long in truth to you.
I set down for you here — if you should
ever, for love's sake, send and make claim
for any message back from me — a pro-
foundly grateful remembrance ; and so
much more, so much more that has never
failed.
Most dear, most beloved, you were to
me and are. Now I can no longer hold
together : but it is my body, not my love
that has failed.
Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY
BERKELEY
Return to desk from which borrowed.
This book is DUE on the last date stamped below.
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